Forestry

The “best with 2” tag made me cautious, but Forestry was excellent with four players. Yes, there is a little downtime. In return, you get a table where you cannot sketch a route in round one and simply follow it to the end. The other players are there to wreck the plan. Thankfully.

Each player runs a sustainable logging business: cutting and planting trees, managing resources, and trying to fulfil contracts for special orders. The systems leave plenty of room to decide where your effort goes, so it never feels like a race along one prescribed track. There is, however, the investment in stars, a shared pressure you need to respect unless you fancy ending up with fewer action points.

Then the late rounds arrive, and that is where it gets good. If you know the game, you can cut someone off; where I come from, that is called a funeral. Opportunities tighten dramatically, strategies collide, and the interaction is not ornamental: four entirely different approaches left three players one point apart, while the fourth paid dearly for losing the tech race and falling behind on action points. That is where you want the curtain to fall.

There is also a second style of play with strongly asymmetric character powers, in the manner of an Arnak expansion. But even in its basic form, Forestry is a cracking game: a demanding euro that lets you build a plan, then invites everyone else to turn up with a saw.