Wouter & Ymke 
Going for a walk through the forests of the Pacific Northwest sounds pretty relaxing. You follow a trail, collect some berries and mushrooms, learn a little about the plants around you and hopefully return home without having eaten anything poisonous. Forage turns that idea into a roll-and-write in which you explore trails, preserve what you find and prepare gifts for friends and family.
It certainly looks very cosy. The first few rounds are mostly about filling jars and following trails, but that doesn’t last. Soon there are several cards in front of you, bonuses scattered everywhere and more than one useful place for the same dice. Our peaceful walk through the woods became surprisingly mathematical.
👥 1-6 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 15-30 minutes
📝 Designers: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin & Shawn Stankewich
🎨 Artwork: Beth Sobel
🏢 Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Forage is played over thirteen rounds, with everyone playing simultaneously. At the beginning of each round, seven regular foraging dice and one special die are rolled. The regular dice are sorted according to their symbols. Matching symbols form separate groups, and all dice showing unique symbols are placed together. Everyone works with the same roll and decides independently how to use it.
There are three main actions: store, explore and gift. To store, you choose one group of matching dice and use those symbols to fill jars on your pantry cards. The jars are arranged in rows and columns, with bonuses for completing certain combinations. Exploration uses the group of non-matching dice. Here you cross off forageable items along trails, drawing lines between neighbouring locations you’ve marked. Completely surround an area and you receive the bonus inside.
New exploration cards are placed next to your existing ones, so trails can continue from one card to another. Gift-giving works differently again. You can use either a matching group or the non-matching group to complete requirements on your gift-giving cards. Some gifts need particular ingredients, while others are more flexible. The special die joins whichever group you choose.
Completing rows, columns, surrounded areas and gifts can give you prestige, time, experience, knowledge or additional actions. Finishing an entire foraging card also gives you one time. Bonuses are resolved immediately, so something you gain from one card can be used elsewhere during the same round.
Time can be spent to add an ingredient of your choice to an action. Spending two time gives you another dice action, using a group you haven’t already used that round. You can also spend time on journeys. A new journey tile is revealed each round and added to the journey area. Most can be taken by spending time, while some give everyone an immediate choice of two actions or rewards and are then discarded.
Three shared goals give everyone another source of prestige. Once someone reaches a goal, the other players have the rest of that round to score the same value before it drops for future rounds. At the end of most rounds, you also draw a new foraging card and either add it to your tableau or discard it for one time. After round thirteen, prestige from your cards, journeys, goals, experience and knowledge is added together. Even completed items on unfinished gift-giving cards score a point each.
Artwork & Components
Beth Sobel’s forest illustration on the box immediately sets the scene, and the same greens and earthy colours continue through the cards. The three card types are easy to separate once they’re spread across the table. Pantry cards are orange, gift-giving cards are blue and exploration cards are mostly green. That becomes increasingly useful as your tableau expands.
We particularly liked the chunky wooden dice. They’re easy to handle and the ingredient symbols are easy to recognise after a round or two. The regular dice have a natural wooden finish, with the dark special die standing apart. There’s also a card representing a woven basket where the dice are sorted each round. It doesn’t need to look like a basket, but I’m glad it does.
Everything is marked with dry-erase pens, so the game looks very different by the end. Pantry cards fill with crosses, exploration cards get covered in trails, and the time tracker gradually becomes a mess of black marker. The artwork inevitably disappears underneath some of it, particularly on the exploration cards. Thankfully, the colour coding and symbols remain readable even when you’ve been scribbling all over them.
The back of the rulebook includes information about some of the actual mushrooms, berries and plants represented in the game, including morels, porcini mushrooms, fiddleheads and salmonberries, along with advice about responsible foraging. I enjoyed reading through that after our first game. Being good at Forage, it turns out, still doesn’t qualify you to eat random mushrooms in the woods.
Our Experience
We play plenty of roll-and-writes, and our first comparison was Silver & Gold, mostly because of the card-based setup and the way you’re marking your own little puzzle as you play. That comparison didn’t last very long. Once our tableaux grew, we weren’t only looking for somewhere useful to place the dice. We were checking what would happen afterwards.
During our first game, we’d complete a row or surround an area and take whatever bonus came from it. In later games, we sometimes left sections deliberately unfinished. Having a row sitting one jar away from completion could be more useful than finishing it immediately, especially if that bonus could help somewhere else. We had one turn where an ordinary-looking dice choice kept leading to another bonus until several cards were completed.
Time caused more discussion than we expected. Initially, we mostly kept it around for rolls that were missing an ingredient we needed. In later games, we were more willing to spend it before we were actually stuck. We also stopped automatically choosing the largest matching group. Sometimes the smaller group finished exactly what we wanted, whereas four matching symbols would just add a few crosses to a pantry card.
Exploration caused the most second-guessing. Once we’d placed another card alongside the existing trail, it wasn’t moving again, and there were definitely a few occasions where someone noticed the better placement immediately after putting the card down. Nothing disastrous happened. It just provided something to complain about for the next few rounds.
Adding more players didn’t change our games as much as expected. Most of the time everyone was staring at their own tableau, with the shared goals and journeys occasionally pulling our attention back to the middle. The people around the table had a much bigger effect on the pace than the player count. Once there were enough cards in play, some of us picked a good option and moved on. Others wanted to make absolutely sure there wasn’t a better sequence hidden somewhere. I won’t name names.
Our Thoughts
Forage ended up being more involved than we expected from its appearance and fairly straightforward opening rounds. Not because there are lots of rules to remember, but because the amount of information in front of you keeps growing. You might have several places where a group of dice works, and finishing one of them now isn’t always better than leaving it for later. That’s enough to give us something to think about without making the rules themselves difficult to keep track of.
Our main criticism is the final part of the game. A large tableau can be slow to read. There are crossed-out jars, unfinished gifts, trails, bonuses and several possible places for the dice, and checking all of them takes time. Simultaneous play doesn’t help much when someone is still working through the options on their own cards. With players who want to find the best possible sequence, those final rounds can drag.
The dice can also leave you with a result that doesn’t suit what you’ve been preparing. Time and the special die give you some room to adjust, but they don’t make every roll useful. We’ve had rounds where the best available option was clearly worse than what we’d hoped to do. That’s part of playing a dice game, but it’s worth knowing if a bad roll tends to bother you.
Interaction is limited. Goals and journeys occasionally make you pay attention to what someone else is doing, particularly when a goal is close to dropping in value, but most of the game is spent working on your own cards. We didn’t find ourselves watching other tableaux very closely. Whether that’s what you want from a roll-and-write is probably more relevant than the player count itself.
There are 108 different foraging cards including the starters, alongside different goals and journeys. We certainly haven’t seen every possible combination, but the overall structure becomes familiar after a few games. Different cards change what you’re trying to complete and how the pieces line up; they don’t send the game in a completely different direction each time.
We’ve played enough Forage now to know what to expect from it, and we’re not done with it yet. There’s usually something after a game that makes us think we could’ve handled a round differently, or spent time somewhere we didn’t. For us, there’s enough left to figure out to put it back on the table again.
📝 We received a copy of Forage from Alderac Entertainment Group.
