Wispwood Review – Spirits of the Forest
Wispwood is the debut title from American designer Reed Ambrose, sharing some commonalities with other mid-weight nature themed ‘take-and-make’ titles of the past few years. Perhaps that’s why CGE decided to take the aesthetics of Wispwood into a darker direction, with enough of a Halloween bent I can see it becoming a perennial fall favourite for parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Stop me if you’ve heard this one – in Wispwood, you will draft tiles and attempt to arrange them in a configuration to satisfy scoring cards across a set number of rounds. If it sounds familiar, it’s because many elements of Wispwood will be, but there are enough twists that those feeling déjà vu from the rules and components might still find space on their shelf for it.
As usual, the CGE production is excellent without being overly deluxe – for my money CGE do some of the nicest feeling productions in the industry, with the density of the cardboard and the finish always a pleasure to handle. There is one significant component criticism in Wispwood however, and it’s that it really, truly benefits from a draw bag for the tiles. I can think of exactly zero games I have played where ‘place stacks of tiles face down and shuffle them’ has ever been more effective than tossing them in a giant bag and swirling them around. Having added one to this review copy of Wispwood, I wouldn’t go back.
The central conceit of Wispwood is that players are constructing a forest filled with a mixture of trees and ‘wisps’, spirit elements that have particular spatial demands. Glowing Jack-o-lanterns, flying hearts, blue orbs of light and ethereal green witches’ hats embody the four varieties of wisp, with the underside of each tile a plain old tree. At the start of the game, one scoring card per wisp type as well as one ‘tree’ scoring card is dealt out randomly, guiding players across three rounds of play. The variety of scoring cards keeps things fresh across early plays, while variants at the end of the rulebook can shorten each game by turfing both the ‘tree’ scoring card and the third round entirely.
Round one sees players construct a four-by-four grid, expanding to five-by-five and six-by-six for the second and third rounds respectively. Each player’s forest builds out from a double sided ‘Cat’ tile, which is stacked upon a tree tile before play begins. The central ‘Pond’ board holds the available wisp tiles, flanked on each side by a particular polyomino shape. When a wisp tile is drafted, players must choose which shape on either side of that tile they’ll create in their forest – the drafted wisp forms just one part of the shape, while the rest will be made of random wisp tiles flipped to show their tree side. Once a player has completed their grid for that round, play stops and resets for the next round. So far, so standard, but there are a number of design decisions which enrich Wispwood for the better and make it far more confrontational than it might first appear. Firstly, if the Pond ever holds only a single type of wisp tile, all empty spaces are refilled at the start of the next players turn. Players can also elect to flip their Cat tile from Ready to Hidden to clear and refill the entire Pond and yes, this can be done even if a refill was also just triggered from the single wisp type condition.
These two options shake up the tempo even in the first round, giving players ways to mitigate their own poor options or even purposefully mess with those ahead of them in turn order. Rather than refilling the Pond, ‘hiding’ one’s Cat can instead allow any polyomino shape to be chosen, not just the one either side of the drafted tile. In a nutshell, Cat actions are extremely powerful, but can’t be triggered too often without taking a ‘Tree turn’. Remember how one of the scoring cards each game is to do with Tree placement? This action refreshes a Hidden Cat tile to its Ready side and has players place between 1-3 Tree tiles down. It also skirts around a potential rules issue whereby the only available tiles are between shapes a player can’t legally place in their forest. Without judicious use of ‘tree turns’ and Pond refills, there’s a good chance at least one player will end the round without filling their grid and missing out on the scoring bonus for doing so. Furthermore, when playing with four, only three rounds total ensures the last player will never receive the starting player token. The ‘push and pull’ here is the most delicious part of Wispwood as players can’t afford to wait for someone else to make the situation better for them and need to take charge where possible. Forget ‘hate drafting’, this is closer to ‘hate shedding’ and it’s great when it happens to others and miserable when it happens to you.
What lifts Wispwood up even further happens just after round scoring, when players can choose to move their Cat to another tree tile before decimating their forest. All tree tiles are removed, leaving only a lone tree upon which your Cat sits and any drafted wisps. The growing boundary of a players forest each round and the removal of tree tiles shifts what would otherwise be a straightforward puzzle into something far more complex. Even a ‘good’ round can still close opportunities for the future, while canny players will always have an eye on the bigger picture even if it means taking a subpar choice in the short term for greater rewards in the long. End of round and end of game scoring isn’t overly cumbersome, but CGE nevertheless have produced a free app available on both iOS and Android devices which uses the camera to read and calculate a single players score after they’ve input the scoring cards in play for the game.
Wispwood does enough to stand out in a crowded genre space, its darker visuals and seasonal vibes pushing it away from becoming one more take-and-make landscaping simulator replete with lush meadows and gentle streams. A slight penchant for meanness and the occasional bum run of luck may sour it for some groups but provided everyone is giving as good as they get neither of these niggles outweigh the joy of puzzling out the best tile placement and wiping the market at just the right moment.
Wispwood was reviewed using a retail edition kindly provided by publisher CGE.
