Dartmoor is a beautiful place, filled with diverse plants and animals. Create your own unique landscape of moors, and fill it with all kinds of life in order to score big!

What Is It?

🎯The Goal of the game is to have the most points
⚙️Open Drafting / Tableau Building – On a turn, players can draw cards or play cards. When drawing, they can take from the deck, or draw from the clearing, where players have discarded cards
⚙️Multi-Use Cards/Layering – When playing cards, players will need to “pay” for them with other cards from their hands. Sometimes, they will get bonuses for using certain types as payments. Additionally, Many cards are split – top and bottom or left and right – which give players options for what plants/animals to play to their forest. Cards will be layered to only show the sides players are actively using
⚙️Variable Game End – The game ends as soon as the 3rd winter card is drawn; those are shuffled into the bottom part of the deck

Who Is It For?

👥2 to 5 Players – I think it works well at any count, but I’m partial to 5 because you use all the cards in the deck
👥Ages 12 & Up / Family Weight Gamers – I think gameplay is smooth and approachable, but there’s a lot of card abilities and options to consider, so it might be harder for younger or less experienced players
👥Fans of the original Forest Shuffle or any drafting/tableau style games

PROS

🟢Aesthetics – Nice art
🟢Lots of variety in cards, combos, and scoring
🟢Rules are well-written and clear
🟢Easy set-up and clean-up
🟢Smooth and snappy player turns

CONS

🔴Bit of a table hog, especially with max players
🔴Potential for uneven turns, never my favorite
🔴Caves didn’t seem all that interesting to me, and I kind of wish there were more so they weren’t all used even in higher count games

Final Thoughts

Very solid tableau building game. I like how when people pay for cards they go to the drafting area instead of a discard pile, because I think that adds to the strategy of what you choose to discard. I also thought it was fun because I had lots of turns where I was planning to play a card but then changed to drawing because someone threw out the perfect card I needed! Definitely a neat one, with plenty of variety.

Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 6/10

Designer – Kosch
Artists – Toni Llobet, Judit Piella
Publisher – Lookout Games, Asmodee
MSRP – $27.99
Website

*I was provided a copy of this game to do this review*

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