Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8675693/forest-shuffle-exploration

Designer: Kosch
Publisher: Lookout Games
Artists: Toni Llobet, Judit Piella

This expansion was my first experience with Forest Shuffle, as it gave me a way to learn and play the game solo. Forest Shuffle is a combotatstic game focused on playing cards into your tableau “forest” to score as many points as possible. For the solo mode, there is a certain challenge the player must complete that usually has a form of numerical stipulation and a specific type of card that value corresponds to (ex. 10+ trees in your forest). There is also endgame score goals to reach a bronze, silver, or gold level.

In terms of gameplay, turns are identical to the standard game where the player works towards that challenge goal and to score as many points as possible. In between your turns, there is a deck for the “opponent” that changes the state of the clearing and helps with keeping the length of the game from getting too long (they can cycle cards out of the deck).

I have to say, this was really fun! There are twelve challenges to try, and while the core gameplay loop is the same, the varying goals do help with variety and replayability. I like that each game just focuses on certain conditions and score maximization while the AI type player simply affects the game and card availability without being complicated or creating an extra person to score (having to calculate two scores would be terrible!).

For me, none of the challenges were necessarily difficult (as in I never got below the minimum point value for the bronze level), but some were definitely easier than others. The luck of the card draw and card randomization can also be impactful on success.

Of course, the art is absolutely beautiful and the theme is amazing. I also love that they didn’t use any plastic!

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with this one. I played it a lot so I could try all twelve challenges and appreciated each play and the unique strategies to experiment with. I also like that it plays pretty quickly solo (like 30-45 minutes per game). For a nice, clever combo-focused puzzle that’s relaxing but still thinky and puzzly, and comes in a reasonably sized box, this one is perfect!

I should mention that there are additional cards in this expansion not directly associated with the solo mode that can be used in a solo or multiplayer game, such as unique cave cards, and fifteen new and rare species cards.