SNAP Review – Best Treehouse Ever – Forest of Fun

Asher and Anitra examine the new addition to Best Treehouse Ever in this short audio review. Listen in, or read a summary of our thoughts below.

Best Treehouse Ever: Forest of Fun is a sequel and expansion to Scott Almes’ Best Treehouse Ever from Green Couch Games. On its own, it plays 1-4 players in about 30 minutes. Combine with the original Best Treehouse Ever to accomodate up to 8 players.

How to Play

Each player starts with a hand of 6 cards. Choose a card to keep, then pass the rest clockwise. When everyone has made their choice, add your card to your treehouse.

Every treehouse has a balance marker that you must move left or right depending on where you place your card. (You cannot play a card if it would force your balance marker off the treehouse.) This keeps you from building a treehouse that would tip over. By the end of the round, your treehouse will begin to look like an inverted pyramid.

There are 6 different colors of rooms, each representing a different type of fantastic room (water, food, education, activity, entertainment, and outdoor).

Keep drafting and placing cards until you run out of cards to draft, then score at the end of each of 3 rounds.

At the end of a round, players get to draft cards that allow them to double the scoring on a single type of room, or make it so a type of room does not score that round.

At the end of the game, if you have the most of one kind of room, you get bonus points equal to the number of rooms you have in that color.

New in Forest of Fun

Forest of Fun adds a few new types of cards, and a new way to play.

Animal cards take up space in your tree but don’t score any room points for the round. Instead, they score at the end of the game for each adjacent room in the matching color.

Forest cards are extra-large cardboard cards that give a single player a special power or unique bonus. Each player draws one at random at the beginning of the game and may choose to use the “basic” or “advanced” side.

Bonus cards in Forest of Fun incentivize you to put certain animals in your treehouse. Every bonus card depicts 2 animals. If your treehouse contains one of the animals, you’ll get an extra point, but if you have both animals in the treehouse, you’ll receive 3 points.

Solo Variant

Take 2 cards off the draw pile. Keep one for your treehouse, and discard the other, keeping colors separate in the discard. Do this 5 times; when you have 5 cards in your treehouse, the round ends. At the end of the round, you should have a different discard pile for each color.

Score at the end of each round by multiplying the number of rooms you have in a color by the number of cards of that color in the discard. (Repeat for all 6 colors.) If you have 4 or more cards of a single color in your discard, that color does not score at all.

Impressions

The animal cards make it challenging to get a high scoring treehouse, but we like the variability and player powers that come with the Forest cards. In the original Best Treehouse Ever, scores often stayed incredibly close because it was hard to pull ahead of your neighbors; both the animals and the player powers give more choices and allow the points to spread farther.

I like new improvement of the solo variant and the Forest cards, but I don’t like the animal cards as much.

Asher

There are material improvements: the chunky cardboard Forest cards and the solid scoreboard are much easier to use than the card-only setup from the original game. The new box is big enough to hold both games comfortably, so if you’re treating it as an expansion, you can easily combine the two games into a single box.

Overall, we like Best Treehouse Ever: Forest of Fun. It is an improvement over the original, whether or not you combine it with the original game.

If you already like Best Treehouse Ever, then Forest of Fun will be at least a 4 out of 5 for you. For families who have never played or didn’t love the original, we’d give Forest of Fun a 3.5; it’s a solid family game.

Ask for it at your local game store, directly from Green Couch Games, or find it on Amazon.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Best Treehouse Ever: Forest of Fun from Green Couch Games for this review.

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