Canopy

Solid set collection game, maybe too generic for my taste. But it's fine, I enjoyed.

An interesting semi-open drafting game with a unique mechanic. Plays quickly, has meaningful decisions, and powers give you enough agency that it doesn't feel random. Playing optimally is weirdly memory-intensive for its weight, though, and this is a game that could really benefit from variable setup of its card pool.

MIKE AND JULES. A fun game with some neat innovations, but I can't see myself playing it much. I have too many other solo and single-player games and this one doesn't stand out enough.

Not only is Canopy a beautiful game (after all, it is illustrated by Vincent Dutrait) which comes in a zero-waste box (no plastic included! Instead of baggies, you have paper envelopes), but the gameplay is also great. Canopy is based on a mixture of drafting and push your luck. You have a deck which contains the cards that players add to their rainforests over the course of 3 seasons. Each season, cards are added to 3 facedown piles. On their turn, a player looks at the first, decides whether to add all cards to their forest, or pass. If they pass, they add an extra card from the deck to that pile and move to the next pile. This process is repeated until a player either decides to take all cards from a pile, or the top card from the top of the deck if no pile contains cards that they want. There’s no possibility of going back to a pile you dismissed, which accounts for the push-your-luck aspect. As time goes by, you get to partially know what’s in each pile, but the extra card added anytime you skip a pile brings an additional element of imperfect information. There are several types of cards –trees (which can either be used to start a new tree or added to increase the length of a previously placed tree), canopies (which complete a tree and are going to offer you points), wildlife (with special effects), plants (which present various ways of scoring, mostly based on set collection elements), rain and sun cards (having a pair of each awarding you VPs) or dangers such as fire, disease or drought (which determine you to lose cards). Each season ends with a scoring phase, after which all cards from your forest – except for trees and wildlife – are discarded. Canopy is quick to play, offers significant decisions in the course of 30 minutes (will you settle with this pile of cards, or are you going to risk and take a look at the next one? What is going to help you more than your opponent? Should you push your luck and take this Bromelia card now, knowing that if you add 1 more to your forest, you lose points?) and has multiple modules (seasonal changes, additional plants and natural phenomena, alternative wildlife). Review copy by @weird_city_games

It felt like a few unrelated scoring systems smashed together, not awful but not all that compelling either.