A game with Vladimir Suchý’s name on the box is now pretty much guaranteed to make its way fairly swiftly into the Headlines from a Solo Player collection without much, if any, hesitation. I believe the cool cats among us call it an ‘instabuy’. Does this particular instabuy, co-designed with Ross Arnold leave me with any regret? Nope. My use of the phrase 'cool cats' however....
Woodcraft
Designer: Ross Arnold, Vladimír Suchý
Publisher: Delicious Games
2022
How to Play:
Players take on the role of the titular Woodcrafter - your individual player board doubling as your woodcrafting workshop. You’ll start the game with four unique ‘contracts’ that you are trying to fulfil by the end of the game in addition to any other optional contracts that you would be well advised to also try and grab and complete - as you progress generally throughout the game you will gradually increase your workshop’s ‘reputation’ and at the end of the game you multiply your workshops reputation level by the number of completed contracts to get a significant chunk of your endgame victory points.
Contracts will have a cost attached that you will need to meet in order to be able to fulfil them – occasionally some resources that you can grab through general play, but always a smattering of green, yellow or brown dice which represent the Wood which you will need to erm, Craft. So for example one of your contracts could require you to have three dice – a brown 5, a yellow 2 and a green 4. You will start the game with some dice of lower values but you are going to have to quickly start manipulating any that you own (as well as getting more) in order to meet the exact combinations displayed on each contract.
Helping you to fulfil these contracts….
• A nifty action wheel which will let you pick an action such as buying new dice, selling existing dice, buying resources such as wood and glue that will help you manipulate the dice, upgrading your workshop to give you ever increasing dice manipulation powers. Grab an action from the wheel and once finished pop it back on the wheel in the next sector clockwise. As actions move ever further forward as you take more of them, bonuses will start to reveal themselves on older less popular actions that haven’t yet been taken - making them suddenly mouthwateringly more popular…
• A range of free actions that you can take at any time on your turn which allow you to change the values of your dice - using a saw for example to cut one of your green 6 into two green 3 but having your saw then used up for a while as a result; or gluing a 2 and a 4 together to make a 6, or getting your hands on some resources along the way to graft on to your yellow 2 and turning it into a yellow 3. You get the idea...
• ‘Helpers’ that you can recruit into your workshop (up to 6 of them in fact) that will provide either immediate / recurring bonuses or permanent abilities.
In addition to any immediate bonuses that you might pick up along the way, some of your actions will also let you progress on two separate income tracks, a ‘blueberry’ track (the games main currency) and a ‘hazelnut’ track (which awards VP). After 4, 8 and 11 turns you will perform some housekeeping – resetting any one time tools that you have previously used; earning income from those aforementioned blueberry and hazelnut tracks as well as moving any contracts that you haven’t yet fulfilled further down your workshops so that they reduce in value or even potentially result in an a penalty. Gulp.
Giving your game a bit of focus and direction are a smattering of variable ‘objective’ cards that you will be racing to be the first to reach to claim their juicy additional end game VP. After Turn 14 its time to count up the VP you have earned generally through the game, any VP from any of those objective cards you managed to lay a claim to and then total up how many contracts you have achieved multiplied by the reputation level that your workshop managed to reach. Hopefully you have enough points to feel generally warm and good about yourself and to have won the game.
There is quite a lot more going on with Woodcraft – particularly in relation to how its many individual parts intertwine. Certainly do take a look at the rulebook and playthrough videos if you want to get a better sense of some of the intricacies that place this firmly in the mid-heavy weight category.
Solo Headlines:
Ten face down solo cards - after your turn simply flip one over and it will highlight one or more tiles on the action wheel to move as well as perhaps some things from the main display to refresh. Those extra VP awarding optional Objective cards will also start to be randomly removed from the game after a certain amount of turns so you might want to get a jog on and start snapping them up while you still have the chance!
Woodcraft is about as ‘beat your own score’ as you can possibly get – so a heads up to those that prefer a point scoring opponent as you won’t find one within a ten mile radius. But for those more familiar with previous Vladimir Suchý games, the solo mode in Woodcraft is business as usual. Aim to score 110 to be ‘good’ or 140 to be ‘excellent’. I only achieved 140 once in 11 plays and generally struggled with the 110 too – this might however tell you more about me than the game itself but for me, it felt like a good challenge.
Plays short this one: 45-50 minutes perhaps - maybe a little longer when factoring in some inevitable falls down an Analysis Paralysis hole or ten. But only having 14 turns in the game (albeit with lots of free actions padding out some of the turns) makes a for a shorter game than some other similarly weighted games with perhaps 16+ turns. No additional rules to learn, no complex flow charts to navigate to control an automa – just a good, tight, enjoyable brain burner of a solo Beat Your Own Score optimisation puzzle – with a ‘try to get 140 if you think you are hard enough’ challenge to aim for.
General Headlines:
The ‘really like’…. Ok, let’s get it out there right from the start: The dice manipulation in this game is an absolute joy. More generally the theme of the game is kind of incidental - woodland folk something something something. But the mechanic of cutting dice, gluing dice together, taking a ‘cuttings’ from dice to plant and watch them grow – it is both thematically and mechanically superb. It feels tactile, fresh, unique, puzzling, satisfying. I almost enjoy playing the game just for this element alone. I will warn those of you that are prone to a bit of Analysis Paralysis that the dice manipulation and the game more generally is going to make you sweat as you toil through the different ways that you hypothetically might for example be able to get a ‘Yellow 3’ – do you buy the Yellow 6 and cut it in half but use up all of your money on the purchase? Do you plant a bit of your existing yellow die and wait another turn until that seedling has grown, aaarrrrgh wait I cant cut any more at the moment as I used up my saw on the last turn and it doesn’t refresh until the fourth round, I could buy another saw though – that might work, or that bit of wood that I got earlier I could graft on to it now and then cut at it later. The beauty with solo play is that I have the space and the time to fall down a few of these AP holes guilt free without worrying that other players are wanting to end my days. But I can easily see this game being a little frustrating at higher player counts as players have lots of “oh wait, I want to play that this way instead actually” take backs. But if someone asked me why they should play Woodcraft I would be pointing directly at the dice manipulation alone and saying “you have to try this”.
It’s not just the dice manipulation that I like a lot. I’m already on record (or I am now!) saying that Action Selection is probably my favourite mechanism in Euro board gaming – seeing actions that you may not have taken for a while grow stronger and more tempting, or actions that you have just taken and are desperate to take again losing their value for a while (a shout out to Boonlake and Ark Nova that have been to the table recently and scratching my action selection itch very well). I’m also going to put myself on record as saying that Praga Caput Regni (also by Vladimir Suchý) is quite probably my Number One game – the simplicity of its action selection wheel, actions growing stronger, new bonuses attaching themselves to actions that you may not have otherwise considered. I LOVE IT. There is more complexity to the Woodcraft action selection wheel than the very simple “take an action and move it back to the start and turn the wheel” in Praga but not a whole heap more. Here I have the flexibility to be able to take the same action on multiple turns without penalty but I wont get any tasty bonuses for doing so and as I take the same actions a few times, those less popular ones further back start to become too good to turn down. I wont bog this review down too much with the mechanics of how the action selection wheel works – other than to say its thinky, combo triggering, reasonably straightforward to use, has the potential for some good interactivity as the another players turn (or in this case the solo mode) often directly impacts not just on the action that you were potentially going to select but also the emergent bonuses that you might now have at your disposal elsewhere.
For me these two things alone - Dice Manipulation and Action Selection - make this game a must play. Is it a must own? Possibly yes, though the game isn’t without its minor faults… or should I say a couple of perhaps personal slight issues that I have with it that might absolutely just be me. But hey, this is my review so I will put my thoughts out there….
The stuff I maybe didn’t like…
First gripe is that I don’t feel game to game that my skill alone is responsible for the points I score. And that isn’t just me being a sore loser (scouts honour). The rulebook here specifically references the fact that how much I will score in the solo game will depend on other factors such as how many bonuses the solo mode offers randomly up to me as the game progresses. As I mentioned in the solo game 110 is a decreed to be a good score and 140 an excellent score – but there are simply going to be games where I could be playing the absolute game of my life and I am just mathematically not going to be reaching 110 let alone 140. Now with this particular game I having a massive heap of fun playing it, exploring it and figuring out its interconnecting cogs. And I do confess that this exploration is generally more important to me as a deep diving solo player than whether I have won or lost a game. But part of me also likes to use VP as an indicator that I am getting incrementally better at a game; that my hours and hours of playing are seeing my scores gradually creep higher and higher as I get better and better. Dunno, I just felt a little unsatisfied at times that my efforts over repeated plays were resulting in yes, knowing how to play the game well and generally having a good time but ultimately not always seeing that reflected in my VP – indeed seeing quite swingy scoring game to game.
The second gripe is that there are a couple of parts of the game (well one more than the other) that I felt were underutilised in the solo game and made me feel like I was missing out a little. Perhaps this is either that they actually are less used in the solo game or that the game allows me to totally ignore them and fall into tried and tested habits but in either event I found it noticeable enough to mention. An example – as well as being able to saw dice to make it a two new dice, or plant dice to grow it into a new value, or add wood to a dice to increase its value, there is also the option to glue two dice together to make one brand new dice of a higher value. I played 11 games and didn’t use this feature once. I even spent a game actively aiming to do it as a tactic and just didn’t. It felt counter intuitive to go from two dice in my pool to just then having one in such a tight game. I mean its not a deal breaker at all that – just interesting to note that the game, over repeated plays, led me or enabled me to not use one of its core options. The more significant example though is a really interesting mini game at the top of your player board – a tool shed of sorts where you can accrue tools during the game and store them, placing them in a particular way to try and trigger bonuses. It looks really fun but again, over 11 plays I managed to store a grand total of three tools ever and triggered one small bonus. The effort involved in trying to trigger it benefits just didn’t seem of comparable value to the more central task at hand of completing objectives and building my reputation. The choice between completing a contract that will get me one tool that could possiblyget me a relatively small bonus later OR completing a contract that gets me 3 reputation points and some likely other goodies now felt like a no brainer. This one was a bit more significant for me as I felt like I was missing out on a really neat mini game. Perhaps at multiplayer this is a more viable strategy. Perhaps it was just me not being able to take advantage of it and just not playing well or not living dangerously enough. Either way I felt I was missing out and couldn’t quite find my way to this particular party.
Back to the general rambles….
….but overall I had a huge amount of fun playing this one. Don’t let its slightly cutesty, foresty, impish theme fool you into thinking that this is a light game - its complex and definitely on the chewy end of mid-heavy weight and its tight for sure – but it’s not a vice like tight grip as I feel that it’s perhaps getting a reputation for. There are definitely moments where turns can utterly explode and trigger combo-tastic dopamine hits. But yes, you are also constantly having to battle to actually do what you want to do but it plays tight, tight, tight and then BOOM loose, loose, loose. For those that have played other games from Vladimir Suchý I’d place the tightness somewhere between the relative freedom of Praga and the absolute chokehold that Messina 1347 often feels like. Woodcraft is fun tight rather than fraught tight. But it’s definitely tight.
I also mention the potential for big combos as a very slight issue that I had game to game was that it was really easy at times to forget where I was during my turn. There are so many free actions at my disposal here that many a time I might have done two or three of them (and had the long ‘thinks’ in between) and I couldn’t then quite remember whether I had even taken my main action or not. A minor complaint – but one that perhaps does give a heads up for people that don’t like games with those big combos that you get lost in. Or equally for those that do!
I’ve also got a sense from other reviews and comments that some perhaps feel that particularly in the solo game the cards from the main display that they can access (new contracts and helpers) don’t change as much as they might otherwise in the multiplayer game, or perhaps not as much as they might like them to. Firstly, I didn’t get a sense of that – I felt that the main display was regularly refreshing. But equally I don’t want to be awash with choices. I don’t want the display to be refreshed so often that everything that I might want and need is just there for the taking making my job simple. I like how Woodcraft makes me have to figure out how I am going to work best with what I have rather than me just reaching and grabbing what I need with ease.
Two final things that pop to mind as I reflect on things that I liked about Woodcraft. I definitely enjoyed that the game had distinct approaches to gameplay – while its possible here to do a little bit of everything and live to tell the tale, being able to hone in on particular strategies and discover each of their depths was great. Each game felt different and kept me coming back for more. I also particularly liked the fact that I wasn’t simply gaining contracts to fulfil and then just attempting to fulfil them by the end of the game and shrugging my shoulders if I didn’t. When my contracts go into my workshop they are then on a timer - the longer I leave them, the less valuable they become and eventually they start having a negative impact. Tick. Tick. Tick. This timer along with the 14 rounds creates a real sense of tension which I enjoyed.
I’ll stop rambling now other than to say that I’ve quite probably (and deservingly) spent a good chunk of this review fanboying Vladimir Suchý so I shall end with a firm doff of the cap to Ross Arnold for his work here too on this very impressive design.
At a Glance:
+ Fresh and enjoyable take on dice manipulation
+ A great action selection wheel that makes you pivot your plans regularly
+ Different and distinct ways to strategically approach each game
+ A really good blend of both tightness and exploding turns
+ Objectives are on a timer which creates a palpable tension
+ / - Some people might not like beat your own score. I am fine with it personally, particularly in Vladimir Suchy games
- Some areas of the game felt inaccessible in the solo game
- Big combos sometimes led me to lose track of turns.
Final Score:
8.5 out of 10 (Its not going to topple Praga Caput Regni off my top spot, but this is certainly a great game).
Reviewed after 11 plays.
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