Faisal Ghaffar 
Overview
Living Forest received little attention as a first-time designer’s game released by a small publisher until it was catapulted into the spotlight by a shocking win of one of gaming’s biggest prizes. The Kennerspiel des Jahres is a German board gaming industry award aimed at hobby-grade titles, in addition to the longer-running and even more renowned Spiel des Jahres for more children’s games. As a result, receiving the award is significant.
So, let’s see what Living Forest has to offer in order to place it alongside its more well-known competitors (some of which are candidates for the best board games). Is it all worth it?
What exactly is it and how does it work?
Living Forest puts you in the shoes of the spirit world trying to protect the sacred wood from raging fires. It combines the mechanics of a push-your-luck game like King of Tokyo with deck-building and token placement.
The first thing you’ll do in Living Forest is drawing cards from your Guardian Animal deck in the hopes of constructing the behavior you want to take during your turn. Each such card contains icons representing one or more in-game actions as well as an exact amount, which can be negative. After you’ve finished drawing, add up all of the values shown to determine which acts you can take and how potent they will be.
The meat of the play is in taking your actions. Each of the three victory circumstances (different trees planted, fires extinguished, or sacred flowers obtained) corresponds to a different type of action. To begin, you can purchase one tree per turn up to the value of the forest icon total on your card numbers. Trees provide permanent bonuses, and the larger the bonus, the more expensive the tree. Next, if you have a large enough water total, you can destroy wildfires with the water action, but only if there are still fires to put out.
Is it worth it?
In terms of mechanics and gameplay, Living Forest is a daring blend of many different game styles.
When you first start out, it’s very helpful to look at the final win conditions and decide that you’d be better off sprinting toward one right away. However, the game is remarkably dynamic due to the way all of the mechanical aspects are interconnected. For example, the fire condition allows you to potentially win very quickly because you can destroy multiple fires per turn. But if you try that, the players ahead of you in the turn order will snuff out the fires or stop buying cards, so no new ones will start.
The victory conditions are also not entirely balanced. The game becomes much more severe and immersive as the number of players increases, and it works best with four, but there is a trade-off. It also becomes more random because a player may be able to grab working fire vouchers or even outstrip numerous players in a single move if they’re lucky.
