Living Forest - PYL Deckbuilding done right

 A month or two ago, I  stumbled across a game on BGA that I'd never heard of before. The art looked nice, but I knew nothing about it. After seeing it a few times, I decided to give it a try.

Living Forest is a deckbuilding, press-your-luck (PYL) game that uses a blackjack type of "hit me" mechanism to produce resources, then let's you spend those resources on 2 different actions (or just 1, if you push your luck too far and go bust). Like Flip City or Mystic Vale, each round you will play cards off the top of your deck, one at a time, until you decide to stop, or until you hit too many "bad" icons. In this case, the "bad" icons are black circles indicating that a card is a "Solitary animal," I guess having 2 solitary animals together is ok, but they draw the line at 3!

Each card in Living Forest has some number of icons on it, Sun, Water, Seeds, Spirals, and Flowers. Once you stop flipping up cards, you'll total the icons you have showing, and then get to do 1 or 2 actions:

1. Buy cards with Suns
2. Extinguish fire with Water
3. Plant a tree with Seeds
4. Advance on a rondel with Spirals (gaining the effect of another action depending where you land)
5. Flowers aren't a resource, but if you get enough of them in a turn, you win the game
6. Forget the icons and take an "X" token, which you can use later to veto a card draw

You take these actions in an attempt to pursue victory, which you can achieve in 3 different ways:

1. Extinguish 12 fires
2. Plant 12 different trees
3. Draw 12 Flowers in one turn

There are some other details, such as the Victory Tokens that you start with, giving you 1 point toward each of those conditions, which you can steal from your opponents by lapping them on the rondel, or that the trees each give you some permanent icon that counts every turn, or that buying cards created fires that can later be extinguished... etc.

The Strategic Evolution

Everyone I've seen talk about this game (and this includes myself) says the same thing at first... Fire is the only way to win! You can buy a lot of cards on the turns your opponent goes first, generating fires, then extinguish them the following turn, when you go first and they can't stop you. I'll note that I had only played 2p at that point, but based on BGG threads I've seen, the dynamic isn't much different in multiplayer.

I believe it's the case that the Fire victory is the most obvious, most straightforward victory to go for, but I've noticed (as everyone seems to eventually) that as players gain experience, it becomes harder to pull off a Fire victory, and easier to win via other means. Some people have said that once players learn to play around a Fire victory (by buying fewer cards, putting out fires yourself to keep them from your opponent, etc), the Tree victory is the way to go-but I don't agree. So far I've found the Tree victory to be too slow - you're only allowed to plant 1 tree per turn, and while you do start with a victory token and a tree pre-printed on your board, you still need 10 more to trigger the win, and they have to be unique. When I've gone for this, even when I've succeeded, I've found that I also won by Fire or Flowers at the same time, so the Tree victory was irrelevant. Most of the time I think Fire or Flowers can both be faster than Trees. So why do people think Trees is best? I think it's because Flowers takes more nuance (and maybe more good cards for it in the supply). I'll note that you can get 8 flowers from planting the 4-cost and 9-cost trees on your board, and filling that center row, so you really only need to draw a few flowers. There are some good cards for quick Flower win, and if they're in the supply, it might be worth considering that approach... there's a 5-cost tier-1 card that has 2 flowers on it, and there's a mid-rang card with a white circle (which cancels out a black circle, allowing you to hit more on your turn without busting) and a flower that's also good.

Don't get me wrong, trees are important no matter what because they give you that engine building support for both other strategies, but so far I haven't found a reliable way to win with them that beats doubling up on certain trees and going for Fire or Flowers.

Press-Your-Luck done right

Something that's always a challenge in PYL games is the balance between the benefit of flipping one more card vs the detriment of going bust. Many PYL games are very swingy and light, you can't take them too seriously - by their nature they're very luck driven. Sometimes you see a game that tries to use PYL but also take itself seriously, and that's, as they say, a tough nut to crack. Living Forest pulls this off better than any game I've seen (I hear good things about Quacks of Quedlinburg, but I haven't had a chance to play it). If you get too many solitary animals and go bust, you are out an action - that's 1/2 your turn! However, you get the icons on that card, so you could afford a better single action than either of your two actions had you stopped. And sometimes there just aren't 2 good actions for you to do, so by hitting once more when you might bust, you are risking a mediocre action in exchange for a more powerful single  action. In that respect, sometimes it could even be a good choice to bust on purpose, which gives you the added benefit of getting one more solitary animal out of your deck, so your next turn can be stronger.

I really like the way Living Forest implements PYL, and despite that mechanism, I think it's a game you really can take seriously. It's no wonder Living Forest got nominated for the Kennerspiel Des Jahres!

What I'd Do Differently

Whenever I play a game, I always have something I'd do differently, like if it were my game, or if I were developing it, and this is no exception. In the case of Living Forest, after a handful of plays and some discussion, there are 2 tweaks I would love to try (too bad you can't use house rules on BGA):

1. Turn order based on Flowers
   The current turn order (P1 passing around the table) feels arbitrary, and can lead to that undesirable dynamic I mentioned earlier about the Fire victory. Also, Flowers are a win condition, but they do absolutely nothing in-game. Flowers doing nothing doesn't bother me on its own, but I'd like to see turn order each round be based of the number of Flowers drawn. That way you could get some flowers even if not going for that victory, in order to get more favorable turn order more often 
2. Discarding fires when getting X tokens
   Currently, any defense against a Fire victory amounts to "also go fire." That's kind of a bummer, and it contributes to the feeling new players get that Fire is really the only way to go. It would be cool if there were a way to defensively remove fire without extinguishing it yourself, and my proposal here is that whenever you get an X token for any reason, you may choose to discard a fire token from the center (without keeping it)

Those are 2 house rules that I have high hopes for. I have another few ideas that are probably unnecessary as well, but those are the tweaks I would actually try if I had a physical copy of the game. It's very possible that these tweaks are only needed for, or more relevant to, the 2-player game, but I actually think they might help in multiplayer as well.