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SolidForage was another one that came home in the Gen Con bag, and if you've been reading along you know that bag apparently has no bottom to it. This one's from Flatout Games, the same people behind Calico and Cascadia, and they've done here what they seem to do best, which is take something quiet and ordinary and turn it into a game that makes you want to go outside and look closer at things. This time it's foraging. You're out in the woods with a basket, gathering morels and porcini mushrooms, fiddlehead ferns, stinging nettles, salmonberries and huckleberries, and then deciding what to do with all of it once you're home.
It's a roll and write at heart, but the dice work differently than most in that genre. Nobody owns a die outright. Someone rolls the whole pool, splits it into groups based on what matches, and then everyone at the table just points at the group they want and marks it off on their own sheet. There's something almost communal about it that I didn't expect from a roll and write, since so many of them feel like you're playing solitaire next to other people. This one still gives you that shared moment of watching the dice land and everyone doing the math in their head at the same time before anyone speaks.
The choices branch out further than I expected too. You can store what you've gathered, head back out to explore more of the map, or turn around and give it away to someone else entirely, and each of those paths scores differently depending on the cards in front of you. I found myself chaining decisions together more than once, closing off one section of a map because it let me finish a shelf in my pantry, which in turn unlocked a gift I'd been sitting on for three turns. It's the kind of game where a decision from early on has a way of paying off later, quietly, in a way you don't always notice happening until it does.
What I want to talk about is the solo mode, because I don't say this often. I'm not someone who reaches for a game to play by myself. I like the noise of other people at the table, the arguing over whether the mushroom you're holding is actually a mushroom, the moment where someone realizes they should've gifted three turns ago. Solo games have never really called to me the way they seem to call to some people. But Forage's solo variant is genuinely good, and I mean that as someone who went in expecting to shrug it off. It keeps the same shape as the full game, the same tension of deciding whether to store, explore, or give, and it doesn't feel like a stripped down consolation version built as an afterthought. It feels like the actual game, just quieter. I've gone back to it more than once on a night when nobody else was around to play, which is not something I expected to write about myself.
I don't have a tidy way to end this one, other than to say I keep thinking about that basket. Full one week, empty the next, always worth going back out for more.
