Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8402950/whispering-woods

Designers: Cristian Bustos, Bernardo Vásquez
Publishers: Fractal Juegos, Wonderbow
Artist: Weberson Santiago

Whispering Woods is a tile drafting and placement game where players score points by creating paths for various animals through the forest. In a multiplayer game, each player controls one of four types of animals, but in the solo game, the player has one of each type. The solo game has six missions included that provide round limits, varying goals, and specific victory conditions.

In each round of the solo game, the player, after selecting a mission, takes a starting tile and animal and then takes one of each other type of animal (four total). Six forest tiles are laid out which provide the drafting pool. After the player selects one forest tile, they place it adjacent to an already placed tile keeping the terrain type in mind and considering the various relevant visible tasks. A drafted tile can be used in one of two ways: as a forest tile to help create the various trails (tasks), or on its task side, revealing another pattern to complete to score points. When adding tiles on their task side, the player must place an animal token on it from their supply. If no animals are left in their supply, they must place the tile with its forest side up.

After the tile is added, the player can choose to complete and score any number of tasks using any animal that is placed on a task tile. The patterns can be forward or backward (ex. two yellow then two gray or two gray then two yellow) and the same animal can finish as many tasks as possible if viable. The most interesting part in my opinion, and the one that creates such a fascinating puzzle, is that the last tile in the sequence gets flipped to its task side and can no longer be utilized to complete forest patterns.

Once the solo player has executed all moves on their turn, a random tile is drawn from the bag and placed along the edge of the solo score board representing the end of a round. Any tiles in the market display matching that tile type also get discarded in an attempt to keep the market from getting too stagnant.

The game ends once all round tracker spots have been filled. At that point, the player evaluates how well they did. Each mission has specific goals that must be met as well as a minimum score. Another neat aspect is that more round tracker spots become available as objectives on the mission card are accomplished.

Whispering Woods is a solid addition to the tile-laying genre. It’s familiar but also has some unique elements to it via the physical pattern completion and the flip of the tile at the end of the task. I also really appreciate the short play time (like 20 minutes solo), the ease of setup and take down, and that it doesn’t take up too much table space.

I enjoy the solo game, but I have a few small issues with it. First, I greatly appreciate that there is no bot to run or keep up with; the solo mode is super easy to play, and the player gets to solely focus on their own forest which is great. The six missions themselves are similar but different, and they increase in difficulty as they progress. They are a lot of fun to play and provide a serious challenge in terms of the puzzliness of the goals. In fact, this game is genuinely way more thinky than I originally expected and anticipated after reading the rules. The multiplayer game is likely still interesting, engaging, and tricky, but I feel the solo missions require such high success with such tight guidelines that the solo game might be the most difficult way to play.

Continuing with this topic, one of my minor issues with the solo game is how insanely hard it is. For the record, it is entirely possible that I am terrible at the game. The early missions weren’t too bad, but I was even struggling in mission three (maybe even two?). After the first mission, there was no way I was going to score enough points for the minimum, so I just ignored that requirement all together. In the last mission or two, I also gave myself a few extra rounds just to see if I could successfully complete all goals for the mission. I don’t mind a challenging solo game, but this one can be quite frustrating. This leads into my second quibble which is that of luck. Because the patterns in the game require very specific tiles in a certain order, randomly pulling a tile out of the bag and then removing all tiles from the display matching that color can be very swingy. There are times you draw a tile and none of the tiles from the market get discarded (which can be good or bad), and there are times when half the market can be refreshed (which can be good or bad). Next time, I might try a system where (for example) the left two tiles always get discarded and the others get moved down and refreshed. It seems that might remove some of the luck and add a stronger sense of planning since you’d know which tiles are leaving when.

Whispering Woods lands in an odd place for me. I really enjoy it, I think it’s well designed and has gorgeous artwork, and it has really fascinating and engaging gameplay, but I don’t love it. I am very interested in trying multiplayer to see how that goes. It does have decent replayability overall, but I do feel like the core gameplay loop (at least in the solo game) is always the same, and like I mentioned, if playing by the rules, somewhat dependent on luck. Currently, I want to keep this in the collection to try it with other players and to give the solo mode another chance with my own revision to the display situation. However, the longevity of it is questionable; it’ll strongly depend on how future plays go.