I've got a soft spot for small box games, the kind that fit in a jacket pocket or a corner of a convention backpack, and Four Forests from Gold Seal Games earns its place in that category as well as anything I've picked up recently. It runs twenty dollars, which is the sort of price that lets you take a chance on something without the same deliberation I put into a fifty dollar box, and after playing it a few times I think it more than earns that trust. The game is built around a deck of sixty four cards, eight sets numbered one through eight, each carrying its own combination of icons like water, plants, mountains, and sun. You draft your way through four quick rounds, and each round breaks down into four small actions. Cultivate a card into your own habitat, Harvest or Burn a card to cast a secret vote on one of the four creatures in play that round, Pollinate by passing a card to your neighbor, and Prune by discarding one card entirely. It sounds like a lot written out like that, but at the table it moves fast, and by the second round everyone's already found the rhythm of it. The part I keep coming back to is the secret voting. You're placing a card face down on a creature either right side up or upside down, a silent upvote or downvote nobody else can read, and it means the entire game is shot through with this quiet undercurrent of watching. Who's collecting which icons face up in their habitat, who keeps reaching for cards tied to a particular creature, who's gone suspiciously quiet about their votes. That's the kind of indirect interaction I love in a drafting game, the sense that everyone at the table is reading everyone else the whole time without a word being said about it. Ten different creature cards mean you're only ever using four of them in a given game, so the scoring conditions shift every time you sit down to it, and that variability is what makes me want to bring it back to the table instead of shelving it after a play or two. It's the sort of game I'd happily pull out during a decompress session back in the hotel room with Jon, Lanie, and Julie, or slide into a Saturday rotation with Scott and the crew between the bigger box games, something quick enough not to eat the whole afternoon but sharp enough to still make you think. For twenty dollars and a box small enough to disappear into a bag, Four Forests punches well above its size. Worth grabbing.
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