Grimm Forest

Kage, Hector, Eddie and I went on an adventure into the realm of fairy tales when we played Grimm Forest. The game is rather simplistic, but the artwork is superb. It can be played with up to four players. You start by picking out your pig. The game is based around the pigs building houses. Like the fairy tale the game is designed after, you can choose between straw, wood, or bricks. The person who builds three houses the fastest wins, unless two people both have three houses built, in which case whoever has the “higher level” houses wins.

In a two player game you have three locations you can go to- the woods, the fields, and the brickyard. You get, respectively, wood, straw, or bricks in the locations. In the two player game Prince Fable is trying to escape palace life, and at the beginning of the turn a dice is rolled and he goes to that place and takes half the resources, rounded down, in order to make his own houses. After that, each player picks which location they want to go to gather from. This is where it gets tricky because you ideally want both a place you’ll be the only one at, because otherwise you share the items there, but also the place with the most resources. Each house requires 2 materials for a floor, 4 for the walls/body, and 6 for the roof.

After the first turn, during the second part of the turn, you can choose to either build or grab fable cards with your two actions. The fable cards are extra things you can play at the start of the gather phase on top of your gather card to effect the gather phase. While they are usually quite useful, you still have to use your best guess on where to place/use certain cards, because several of them are effects such as trading resources with another player if they’re in the same location as you, and wolves will take resources if a person goes to that location. Once you start building your house, when you get to build the walls, you get an ally card which you either keep or give to your opponent. When you are the first to complete a house of a specific type, you get the choice between an ally card, or one of each resource.

All in all I thought it was pretty fun, though it was a very easy game. The artwork is great, and the miniatures are fantastic. Though I don’t think it will see a lot of play time, I am glad we gave this one a go. It really speaks to my inner child and my love of fairy tales!

Kage’s Notes: Grimm Forest is a decent enough game for what it is, but it suffers from kickstarter levels of overproduction. The entire thing could fit in a Kosmos-style 2 player box with punch tokens and lose nothing in terms of gameplay and almost nothing in terms of looks. As it is, it’s in an oversized box with gametrayz inserts.

That being said, the art is gorgeous, the minis are nice and the overall presentation is outstanding. It’s just all a bit much for an extremely light game, making it hard to justify at it’s price point. The fact that the “automa” for the 2 player game is just a dice roll to halve the resources at 1 location and that fairly accurately mimics an extra player will tell you all you need to know about how deep Grimm Forest is. But despite being shallow, it’s beautiful and plays perfectly well.

Designer: Tim Eisner
Price: $60
Players: 2-4
2 player Scaling: The game adds a dice “automa” and there is 1 less location, plays fine.
Playtime: 45-60 minutes
Estimated Lifespan: 3+ games
Estimated Average Play Frequency: Annually
Complexity: 1.5
Components: 5
Bang for Buck: 2
Value for Time: 3.5
Fun Factor: 3.5
Overall: 3