Skipping Through the Moors – Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor Review

It’s always interesting when good games are reimplemented.

Will the new one keep the same quality or charm as the previous game?

Will it make it better?

Is it being designed to correct mistakes from the original?

You get that with games like Dune Imperium and Dune Imperium: Uprising, which I can’t really comment on as I’ve only played Uprising once.

I’m a huge fan of the original Forest Shuffle, though it did have its problems with dominant strategies, such as wolves and deer.

The two expansions helped mitigate that immensely, but then Lookout Games came out with a new version of the base game: Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor.

Dartmoor was designed by Kosch with artwork by Toni Llobet and Judit Piella and was published in 2025.

There’s even an expansion coming out!

And yet another new implementation.

But we’re talking about Dartmoor here, and I have to say that they have achieved a solid result with it.

I’m going to try to avoid making this review nothing but comparisons to the original game, but some of that is definitely going to creep in here because for this iteration they apparently looked at the original game (without expansions) and said “yeah, let’s avoid this” regarding a number of different things.

In Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor, you are trying to build the greatest ecosystem in the south moors of England, adding trees, shrubs, and the aforementioned moors, all as areas to support plant and wildlife.

Most of the mechanisms are the same as the base game, so you are going to be either drawing 2 cards (either from the clearing or from the deck) or you are going to be playing a card from your hand into your tableau.

The cost of the card you play is in the top left, and you have to discard those cards into the clearing.

Again, as per the base game, some cards you play will give you a bonus if you “pay” for them with cards that have the same symbol.

The Black Adder pictured above, if you discard two blue cards, you will get to take another turn!

Unlike the base game (yeah, here I go again), there doesn’t appear to be a dominant strategy in this one.

Many cards will go together with other cards, but there’s no “if you manage to get all of these cards together, you will win” options.

There are strong ones.

Dragonflies (Dartmoor’s butterflies) score in the same set collection manner (a number of different dragonflies make each set stronger), but there are also cards that will get you points for dragonflies, or even (fewer, admittedly) points for bugs!

Bats score in the same way (5 points each if you have 3 or more different bats in your forest), but more cards score for bats as well (like the Barn Owl above).

A nice addition, though, is that each bat has an effect of its own, which is completely different because in the original, bats didn’t do anything other than be bats.

The bat above lets you put 2 cards from the clearing into your cave.

Which brings to mind another improvement: the Cave.

More animals let you put cards into your Cave, which of course gets you one point for each card.

Not to mention that we have asymmetric Cave powers!

Players draft Caves at the beginning of the game.

Either they will give you a bit of a boost at the beginning of the game, or they will just straight up give you extra points.

I really love what moors do to the game, giving you lots of space to place top and bottom animals, but limiting your side ones.

This gives you the opportunity to score so many dragonflies, or plants, or reptiles, that it really enhances the game.

They are almost like a combination of shrubs and trees, in that some will give you points based on what you have placed into your forest, and some will give you benefits when you place things (not pictured, but one moor gives you an extra card draw when placing another moor, for example).

These give you even more benefits for concentrating on certain aspects, like pawed animals, or reptiles/amphibians, or cards with a certain symbol.

The fact that moors allow two tops and two bottoms but no sides gives you more opportunity to play those plants, reptiles/amphibians, or dragonflies, along with birds that go on the top.

The wide variety of new animal types is also great.

One thing they have removed is the ability to just play a card as a sapling, if you’re in need of a tree and you don’t have any (or any you want to pay for), you can’t play a card as a “moor sapling”.

The backs of these cards are moors, not trees, and you can’t just arbitrarily play them.

You have to wait until a card tells you to play a card as a moor.

This does remove a little flexibility from the game, but I honestly have never played a card facedown as a tree sapling, so I didn’t really see much of an effect from this removal.

I just love the wide variety of scoring options in Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor. You can certainly still do a bat or butterly dragonfly strategy, and some other cards will facilitate that.

But you can do rodents now! Or points based on colours, or moor types, or even reptiles/amphibians (which were pretty much just extra in the original game).

The same Winter mechanic is still there, as you shuffle three winter cards into the bottom part of the deck, and when the third one comes out, the game ends immediately.

That will always provoke controversy, though it just means you have to be aware that the game can end quickly and you’d better do what you want to do before that happens.

I love the variety of scoring options, the fact that the Cave can actually be viable (though not as a main strategy), and the artwork on these cards is just as good as the original.

Forest Shuffle is always going to be a great game, though made even more so by the expansions.

Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor is already there, as this is a wonderful game to play, either as a slight filler (it takes about an hour, so it’s not a quickie) or a lunch time game.

The card play is interesting, even if it’s basically the same as the base game with some variations.

But the combinations that you can build so much surpass the original that it’s almost like Michael Jackson surpassing Jermaine.

If you like Forest Shuffle, you will love this one.

And as a game by itself, Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor is a stellar game in and of itself.

Give this one a try if you can find it.

(This review was written after 4 plays)