Have you ever walked through a jungle and thought to yourself, “I love how colourful this place is! The vibrant green, red, purple, and blue ferns?” and “Wouldn’t this bright yellow fern look lovely if it had an equally yellow parrot on it?” No? Me either. Rainforest, by Johannes Goupy and published by Funnyfox, uses the rainforest name and aesthetic, but the mechanics of the game are completely separated. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, no one is arguing that Cascadia or Wingspan’s themes ties into their mechanics, and those games have won piles of awards.
According to the Board Game Geek description, In Rainforest, your aim is to create a jungle environment that offers a rich variety of vegetation, which will allow you to reintroduce and protect the region’s iconic species: Monkeys, frogs, butterflies, and parrots. The gameplay is simple enough and features a double draft much like Cascadia or Verdant. On each turn, you’ll draft a tile from the central board (the tiles are separated by colour), and take a set of animal tokens from below the tile that you just took. The animal tokens you take must share an attribute, either all the animals of a single colour, or all the tokens of a single animal. Then, you can place your animals on your rainforest tiles and, if completed, place into your tableau.
Each tile is worth a certain amount of victory points on their own, but you can increase the number of points that tile is worth by placing your special totem animal onto that tile. One extra point for each of your totem animal that makes it onto the tile.
Some tiles will require specific animals, and specific colours, but the real restriction comes when you place the completed jungle tiles into your tableau. They must be placed into a 3 x 3 grid, and starting from the bottom left and moving across. This becomes incredibly important as if you can have multiple tiles of the same colour touching each other, you’ll earn a multiplier token called a protected area bonus, which you place on a tile that multiplies the points of that tile. These multiplier tokes are quite limited, making them incredibly valuable.
The game comes to an end once someone places their 9th tile, and the player with the highest score is the winner.
Rainforest is a tile selection and action efficiency game. To do well, you need both your tile selections and animal token picks to be working at the same time. On your turn you do have the option to return a tile to the bottom of the stack to only take the animal tiles, but considering the game is a bit of a race, doing so is really not ideal. You need to be first to the protected area tokens, and you want to be the first one to complete your 9 tile tableau, but doing so cheaply can actually cost you the game. If someone has a 4 point tile, with 2 of their totem animal on it, with a triple score bonus, that single tile could be worth more than your entire tableau.
At 4 players, Rainforest feels tight. The tiles and animals shift dramatically between each of your turns, making forward planning difficult. At the same time, forward planning is required, as you can’t adjust where the tiles go when they’re placed into your tableau. You can only hold 2 animals on your board, and situations will arise where you’ll need to discard an animal lest you complete the wrong tile first and ruin your chance for a protected area token. At 2 players, it’s much more open. You need to specifically target your opponents’ strategy to step on their toes.
I do like drafting games, and Rainforest delivers on that front. There are some tough choices you need to make as a player here. Do you bide your time building up your perfect tiles, or blaze forth and try to end the game before other players manage to recruit their army of butterflies? The tiles of Rainforest are bright and attractive, but incongruent with each other. That said, its attractiveness and ease of play makes it a perfect game to play with those who may not have expressed an interest in board games before, especially if they have a particular affinity for one of the featured animals.
Rainforest was quick to play and attractive to look at, but I don’t feel that it has the replayability that I’m looking for. The scoring is the same every game, with the only thing changing are the order of the tiles and which animal tokens get associated with each tile. Perhaps I’m spoiled by games like Cascadia, and it’s myriad of scoring opportunities, but Rainforest sits in a crowded market, and it’s a game-eat-game jungle out there.
