Guardian Animal cards make up your starting team. Each Animal brings you, with varying degrees of strength, one or more elements: light to attract new animals, shoots to plant protective trees, water to extinguish Onibi's incessant flames, wisdom to advance on the Circle of Spirits, and sacred flowers to awaken Sanki. Then, as I wrote a game session for our internal OG mailing list, a huge amount of discussion popped up. Lots of people threw around the word “fragile” about the game; but interestingly, there were many different conclusions as to what was so fragile about it. One writer said that their group felt the Spiral strategy was superior – as you could almost always generate the action you needed by moving on the circle. Another replied with: “ Fire seemed much too easy to end and win the game with. Fire will happen no matter what, maybe there needs to be a different end value for the fire tokens? I mean it wasn’t even close. There is no way the guys could have won with trees.”

You can add a tree to your forest board. Managing to get 12 different trees is one way to win the game. The trees also have unique, on going benefits to help you throughout the game, like adding permanent symbols or allowing you to take the same action twice.In case you don’t have enough symbols to spend, you can always consider the ‘Take 1x Fragment Tile’ action. This is always available. Not the most exciting… But if the timing is right, it could create a mega Help Line for you! Woah-oah! Livin’ On A Flare This is also a lovely production. Living Forest features two nice token holders for all the trees, and the central board and standees match the theme really well. The stand out component though is probably the set of guardian animal cards, which features a whole host of beautifully serene creatures who all emit an element of bio-luminescence. Many of these have cute characteristics and a kind of charm that makes them extremely appealing to look at in detail, and whilst the theme could have applied in space, or a medieval village or more or less anywhere else, the overall forest aesthetic is lovely. Again, the game ends at the end of any Action Phase when someone has achieved one of the three victory conditions: 12 different Protective trees on their board, 12 Fire tiles in their collection, 12 Sacred Flowers in the Help Line. If only one player has done this, that player automatically wins. If multiple players have met a victory condition, they add up their scores for all three criteria, and the highest sum wins. The artwork on these cards is gorgeous, but your main concern are the icons along the left-hand side. On each card, there’s a series of numbers and symbols on wooden plaques. Top-to-bottom these are: suns, water, saplings, wind, and flowers. Each Guardian Animal Card has at least one of these symbols/numbers on it. Some have multiple combinations on them. Some feature minus numbers. (More about these, later.) Important! A gregarious symbol cancels a solitary symbol. It will therefore be possible to play more than 3 solitary Guardian Animals in the same turn, provided that you have already revealed one or more gregarious Guardian Animals. Note that only the symbol of the solitary Guardian Animal is canceled, the Elements will be taken into account in the Action phase.

Planting a Protective Tree in a corner triggers an immediate bonus Action. This can only be used once per corner. You can keep drawing Guardian cards, but if you reveal 3 Guardians with “ solitary” symbols printed on them in a row, you must stop. A “gregarious” or “neutral” symbol will cancel out a solitary symbol. You can use any Lotus tiles you have acquired to discard a card just revealed with a solitary symbol card to enable you to keep drawing if you like. And… due to all this speculation about how to best win the game, I’ve been thinking about the game pretty constantly this week, and that doesn’t happen often. As a result, this is easily one of the more intriguing games for me this year, and one I still want to explore further. I will probably play this in person with my regular groups more, but it’s also available online at BGA if you want to try it there. In some ways, this game might play easier online as you’ll have the computer to count up your totals in the different areas as well as make sure that you’re not missing any bonuses from your trees or tree board (as we often miscounted things on our own in the FTF games). The art on the cards is nice, and we have a good time asking for cards from the tableau by describing what we see. The rest of the graphic design is good, though you do need to make sure that the players remember to count up their tree and board bonuses. The player standees are not long for this world though as the smallish bases don’t fit well and they constantly fall over. I will probably try to find some plastic stands to jam the character parts into.You can stop drawing cards whenever you want. However, if you reveal a card showing a third solitary symbol , then you must stop drawing cards. This card closes your Help Line. Be the first to extinguish 12 fires. Take that, Onibi! (Onibi doesn’t even feature in the game as a component, which, while could be an opportunity missed, goes to show what true cowardice is. Too scared to show its own face!) One of your primary goals in Living Forest is to stop the woods from burning down (Image credit: Future)