On this untimely episode of the Shut Up & Sit Down Podcast, Emily and Tom are chatting about two cracking games with a little twist of nature in them - Forest Shuffle and Apiary! The former has you playing cards and building a forest, whereas the latter is 99% about moving a big plastic bee, I think? Awkwardly tucked away at the end of this podcast is, fittingly, Misfits - a stacking game with A GHOST!
I gave Forest Shuffle a try on BGA with one other player who also hadn’t played it before. It was okay. It obviously feels pretty similar to Race for the Galaxy in that you’re looking for combos and deciding which cards to give up to pay for other cards, but you’re not building an engine or anything. Pretty much every card is just for final score, so you’re looking for cards that combo well with others. (My forest had a ton of birds and a ton of birds that gave points for having a ton of birds.)
My one game didn’t have an issue of the deer/wolf combo because not a lot of those came out until very late in the game, but I do think that’s not the only balance issue: There are some cards that are just effectively worthless, and so would just be used to pay for other cards. And sure, RftG has a few of those, but they’re pretty rare and even those have their niche sometimes, because of a particular power that might fit well with your tableau. In Forest Shuffle, those junk cards just give you a tiny amount of points, no particular power, so there’s never going to be a time when you want to play them. So then why have them in the deck at all?
That said, if anyone wants to give it a go, I’d play on BGA again. I think I would actively turn down a game of this in real life, just because the scoring would be such a pain.