Welcome to the rotating forest
The Piatnik publishing house has a lot of family and children’s games in its catalog. One such item is Roundforest . Players take on the role of heroes who will have to cope with an unusual forest. The ground rotates after each turn, so marking the path and obtaining the necessary items requires planning and good spatial orientation.
Preparing the components takes a while. Place the game area out of forest tiles, and then place the colored token drawn from the black bag on each tile. In the corners of the created board, players place a backpack of the selected color and their figurine. In addition, everyone receives two compasses and a help card. Place the item tokens in the blue bag, and place the coins, golden apples, the fairy board with random items, as well as tiles and character cards in a place that is accessible to everyone.
Which path to choose?
During our move, we can move our own figure or decide to stay on the one currently occupied. In the first move, we have to leave the backpack and into the forest and we will stay there until the end of the game. The tiles have fields that indicate possible steps in four directions. The white octagons are the available tiles, while the empty ones indicate places where we cannot go.
Regardless of whether the player has moved or not, he must turn the tile on which he is standing 90 degrees in the direction of the mark on the tile. If the figurine has left an empty space behind it, we randomly draw and place a colored token on it. When entering a new location, we can find an item or character, as long as the appropriate token has been left by another person, but most often it will be a blue, yellow or red token.
The first one allows you to take an item out of the blue bag and then put it in a backpack, leave it in the forest or exchange it with a fairy. The yellow color means the same, but the drawn item is placed on another tile with a yellow token on it. Red means take a character card from the deck. Hostile and friendly heroes set us conditions that must be met in order to get rid of their company. If we cannot do it right away, put a character token on the occupied tile – when another player stands on it, he will be able to complete the task. Helpful individuals have abilities that we can use.
The goal of the game is to get three golden apples and carry them to the Forest Spirit that appears during the game and remains on one of the tiles as a token. In order to give away the fruits and win, it is impossible to have unfinished tasks from friendly and hostile heroes.
A pleasant walk
Roundforest surprised me very positively. I liked the board made of octagons the most, and most of all, the way the possible paths change during the game. You can move up to two spaces, but sometimes only one of them will be available, and sometimes none in a given direction. Then we will have to wait until the next round, until the ground turns and unlocks the chosen path.
A lot of randomness, but also replayability is ensured by the tokens taken from the bag, with which we fill the dropped tiles. Thanks to this, while going through the same tile, we can perform a different action each time. Items and coins also come into play in a different order each time, so completing quests and getting rid of characters are hard to plan.
The necessary apples can be obtained in various ways – by completing the lower, more difficult tasks of the character, meeting the merchant or visiting the well tile and spending a silver coin, or by taking the fruit from the chest, if you also have a key. Thanks to this, we can wander the entire board, because every item, money or characters we encounter can ultimately contribute to the acquisition of the golden apples we want.
Roundforest is designed for family gatherings. The rules are simple, the graphics are nice, and the gameplay shouldn’t take more than an hour. I believe that almost all games teach something, but often introducing many mechanics at the same time and understanding their dependencies is too difficult for children to acquire a specific skill. On the other hand, games from Piatnik, intended for less advanced players, most often focus on one mechanic and build the rest of the fun around it. While the game is ultimately all about collecting tokens and getting apples, the way to move figures around the board, rotate tiles, and plan your moves to wherever you want, comes to the fore.
There is a lot of randomness in the game, which I mentioned above. Random tokens, items, and characters do not allow you to consciously collect the things you need, but the gameplay is therefore not the same. We can also always trade with the fairy, so we are not stuck with what we fall for.
A big advantage is the need to follow the actions of other players, so you shouldn’t get bored between your turns. Which tile others move to, how it is flipped, what the players leave behind, and what tokens are placed on the board is of great importance to the others. While there is not much negative interaction here, our movements can block other people’s path or force them to take a circular route if they do not want to collect what is on a given tile.
There is no text in the game, and the instructions are in several languages, so you can sit at the table with children who are not yet reading, as well as in an international group. Roundforest works best as a family title, thanks to which children will learn to plan and feel the atmosphere of an adventure while wandering through a swirling forest.
