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There are worse ways to spend an afternoon than walking through a forest looking for berries, mushrooms and the occasional hedgehog. That’s more or less what Brushwood asks us to do, although our hikers are apparently incapable of seeing a raspberry without wondering how many points it might be worth. As we walk, we spot red squirrels, badgers, European robins, blue tits and black woodpeckers, while our individual routes slowly grow across the table.
Your turn is equally easy to understand: move the shared hiker, choose where to stop and add that forest card to your own route. What makes the walk more interesting is everything you encounter along the way. Birds can become useful around birdhouses and binoculars, mushrooms can be foraged for points, and berries have everyone keeping an eye on what the others have collected. There’s a bit more to consider here than the peaceful walk through the forest might initially suggest.
👥 2-4 players, ages 8+
⏳️ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designer: Filippo Landini
🎨 Artwork: Matt Sanz
🏢 Publisher: Korea Boardgames (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
In Brushwood, each player creates their own hiking route while everyone shares the same central trail. On your turn, you move the hiker one to three spaces forward around this trail. You then take the top forest card from the space where the hiker stops and add it to the end of your route. Your route always grows in one direction, starting from your personal starting tile, so you can’t move cards around later when you realise that you’ve put something in a rather inconvenient place.
Moving farther also affects the players coming after you. Whenever you move two or three spaces, you draw a random berry from the bag and place one on each forest card stack that you pass. If someone later stops at one of those spaces, they take all the berries there together with the forest card. Empty spaces are skipped when moving, so as the game continues, the hiker can travel farther around the board even though you’re still moving it one to three available spaces.
There are three types of berries: cloudberries, raspberries and blackberries. These aren’t worth points individually. Instead, each type is compared separately at the end of the game. The player with the most scores the first-place points, while the player with the second-most gets a smaller reward.
Mushrooms work differently. When the forest card you’ve just taken contains a mushroom, you can claim a matching mushroom token if you’ve collected enough of that type along your route. Taking the token is optional, and once you do, all mushrooms of that type up to that point have been foraged. If you want another token of the same type later, you start counting again from the following card. You can only claim a mushroom token when the card you’ve just taken actually contains that type, so sometimes you have to decide whether to forage now or wait and see what appears later.
The rest of your points come from the wildlife and objects along your route. Animals have printed point values, while birds can also interact with birdhouses and binoculars. Each birdhouse scores according to how many birds of its species you’ve collected. Binoculars instead score birds positioned within two cards to their left or right, regardless of species. A card showing two birds only gives its printed animal points once, but both birds count separately for birdhouses and binoculars. The same bird can also be seen through more than one pair of binoculars.
The game ends once two or more trail spaces are empty at the end of a turn. Play continues until everyone has taken the same number of turns, after which you flip the central board over and use its scoring track. Berries, mushroom tokens, animals, birdhouses and binoculars are all scored, and whoever has the most points wins.
Artwork & Components
The first thing that caught our attention with Brushwood was the forest itself. Matt Sanz has illustrated the cards so that they connect as you place them next to each other, turning your route into one long woodland scene. Trees continue from card to card, with animals, birds, mushrooms and other details appearing between them. Towards the end of a game, several long forests are stretching across the table, each made from a completely different combination of cards.
There’s quite a lot hidden in those illustrations, but the important game information is generally separated enough from the background to remain visible. The animals and birds feel like part of the scene rather than icons pasted on top of it, which I like. The downside is that some of the birds aren’t immediately easy to tell apart. When you’re checking which species belongs with which birdhouse, we sometimes had to look a little closer than I’d prefer. It’s hardly a major problem, but clearer differences between the birds would have helped.
Most of the remaining components are cardboard. There are round berry tokens for the three berry types and rectangular mushroom tokens showing their requirements and points. The berries go into a fabric drawstring bag, which also handles the random draw during play. The central board is relatively small, with the hiker’s trail surrounding an illustrated basket where the mushroom tokens are kept. Once the game ends, you flip that board over and it becomes the scoring track.
Then there’s the shared wooden hiker. It’s a chunky meeple carrying a basket and, honestly, it might be my favourite component in the box. It doesn’t change anything mechanically, of course, but I enjoyed watching this oversized hiker gradually make its way around an otherwise very green table. Still, it’s the completed routes that we tended to look at once a game was finished. Even when someone’s hike had produced a fairly miserable score, at least their forest usually looked nice.
Our Experience
Our first game of Brushwood was very easy to get into. The different scoring possibilities are fairly obvious, so we were already looking for cards that could do several things at once. What we weren’t sure about was how much there would be to consider once we’d become familiar with all of that. A few games later, we found ourselves spending noticeably more time comparing those three possible destinations. Not because we’d suddenly discovered something we’d completely missed, but because we’d become better at judging which of those small scoring opportunities actually mattered to our route.
We started noticing just how differently those small benefits could add up. There were turns where one of us was convinced a card was the obvious pick, only for someone else to point out that another would help a birdhouse, sit in a useful place near some binoculars and bring a berry along for the ride. Neither option was difficult to understand, but deciding which one we actually wanted was another matter. This led to the occasional “Oh, I didn’t see that”, followed by staring at our own forest and wondering what else we’d missed. I mean, we were supposed to be birdwatching. You’d think we’d get better at looking.
Birds were probably the part we ended up paying the most attention to. Their different uses were obvious from the start, but their value became much more specific as everyone’s forests grew. Later in the game, we were checking whether someone had matching birdhouses, where their binoculars were sitting and whether a card with two birds was especially useful to them. A blue tit that did very little for one of us could suddenly be the card somebody else really wanted. We started looking at each other’s routes much more often, not necessarily because we wanted to block anything, but because it helped us understand why another player was suddenly so interested in a card we would happily have ignored.
Mushrooms took us a little longer to judge properly. Early on, we tended to keep collecting because the larger mushroom tokens looked more appealing. That sometimes worked, but there were also games where we waited for another matching mushroom that simply didn’t appear at the right time. After being caught by that a few times, we became more willing to take a smaller token and move on. We still disagreed about it fairly regularly. One of us would happily forage now, while another was convinced that surely there had to be another porcini just around the corner.
The berries probably caused the most discussion around the table. Moving farther to reach the card you want means leaving berries behind on the stacks you pass, and there’s something mildly irritating about seeing one of those rewards eventually come back around for somebody else. Of course, we’d put it there ourselves, so our complaints didn’t receive much sympathy. Other times, berries kept accumulating on a card nobody particularly wanted until the pile became more interesting than the card underneath it. We also found ourselves checking everyone’s berry collections before moving, because another raspberry could be far more useful to one player than another. At two players, we could follow these changes more easily because only one person acted before our next turn. With more players, the trail could look quite different when it came back around to us, and we generally enjoyed having to deal with whatever was left.
Our Thoughts
For us, Brushwood is a family game or filler rather than something we’d sit down with expecting a long-term strategy to unfold. The rules don’t ask much from you, and there isn’t a complicated plan to establish at the beginning. The animal with the most points isn’t necessarily the card you need. A less impressive one might work with something already in your route, move you towards a mushroom token or improve your position in the berries. You’re usually comparing a handful of fairly small benefits rather than trying to solve one difficult problem. That’s basically where the game sits.
There are some echoes of Faraway in building a growing line of cards whose value depends partly on what you’ve already placed, but Brushwood is much more straightforward. There’s none of Faraway’s reverse-scoring structure to get your head around. What I like here is that Brushwood doesn’t need different player powers to make us want different things. The cards we’ve already taken do that on their own. After a while, everyone is looking for something slightly different.
We also liked that paying attention to another player rarely meant we had to attack their route. Knowing what someone else is collecting helps when judging the shared trail, particularly when you suspect they’re interested in something you could take yourself. There’s rarely much reason to sacrifice a good card purely to hurt somebody else, though. That suited us. We still cared about what everyone else was doing, but our own forest remained the main concern. It keeps the other players relevant without turning a walk through the woods into open warfare over a blue tit.
There are limits to how much control you have, and this is probably the main criticism I’d make. Forest cards appear in a random order, berries come randomly from the bag, and some cards are removed unseen at lower player counts. With three or four players, the available cards can also change substantially before you get another turn. Sometimes the right card simply appears at the right moment for somebody, while the thing you were hoping for never turns up. If you like planning several turns ahead and then seeing that plan come together, Brushwood probably won’t give you enough control. I’m also not convinced there’s enough variation for us to keep discovering completely different approaches after many plays. The combinations change, but you’re working with the same scoring ideas each time. For us, that puts it in the category of a game we’ll return to now and then rather than one we’ll want to explore repeatedly over a short period.
We wouldn’t bring Brushwood out when we want something to spend an entire evening studying. We’d bring it out when we want a relatively short game that’s easy to explain, where we can start playing quickly and still find ourselves checking everyone’s forests before choosing where the hiker goes next. I can see it working particularly well with families and newcomers, but also with hobby gamers who enjoy lighter tableau building between longer games. We understood Brushwood pretty quickly, but a few games later we were still finding plenty to discuss when choosing where that hiker should go. It’s still a simple game, and I don’t think that will change after twenty plays. But for the half hour or so it asks from us, we’ve enjoyed going back into the forest.
📝 We received a copy of Brushwood from Korea Boardgames.
