Forestry

I had Forestry on my list for several Fridays, but I kept setting it aside because of the familiar “best with 2” verdict from the BGG community. Wrongly so. Not only is it a great game, it felt excellent at four — and probably more entertaining precisely because you cannot map out one safe strategy in the opening round and execute it mechanically until the end. There is a little extra downtime, but in our game it never became an issue.

At its core, Forestry is a resource-management euro: each player runs a sustainable logging business, cuts down and plants trees, and tries to fulfil contracts for special orders. What I liked is that the game does not force you down a single development path. There is plenty of freedom in where you invest and how you build your route toward points.

The main exception is the process involving stars: everyone has to put resources into it, or they risk falling behind in action points. Beyond that, though, the choices open up, and once you know the system well, you can make the necessary cuts — or, as we call them where I come from, “funerals.” The final rounds become extremely tight, so what you manage to secure, and what you grab before the others do, carries real weight.

The best sign that the system works came from our first four-player game: all four of us pursued completely different strategies, yet three finished only one point apart. The fourth player lost the tech race and fell behind in action points, which shows how costly it can be to lag in that area. Forestry won me over, and I want to play it again soon, this time also trying its other style of play, in which the characters have strongly asymmetric powers, along the lines of an Arnak expansion.