Rainforest City – A Hidden Gem

0:00 in a recent video I asked my subscribers what they love about this Channel and many people responded saying they like it when I share excellent games that are lesser known so thank you very much for your feedback today I have a real for you this is a game that I think is fantastic completely underrated and not very well known at all at least not in the Western Hemisphere it's the game rainforest City and it comes out of Singapore so I first discovered this game last year in Essen uh where I discovered lots of Asian production companies and to be honest uh it was refreshing to see a new take on games you kind of get into a pattern of Euro games a lot of games that are inspired by a European style of game and to find something that was creative and different I really liked uh several elements about this game so we'll look at it the way that we always do looking over the five components I'll crack it open we'll talk about its theme mechanics and components and then strategy complexity and then finally I'll give you my final thoughts on rainforest City to find out what the game is about it makes it very clear as soon as you open the box there's this piece of uh information talks about all

1:33 of the Flora and Fauna in Singapore and so in this game what you're going to be doing is strategically building a city that is set up so that Wildlife can repopulate the area and uh you're basically trying to be environmentally friendly thematically as you're about to find out this game is tremendously in intuitive uh everything about the game makes a ton of sense with uh its significance with respect to the theme so for that I give this game a theme rating of about a seven or even an eight um but let's let's talk about mechanics now so you can see exactly how that supports the theme it's it's throughout everything in the game so right now the game is set up for two players uh I have my own area to build my city down here and then the other player is off the screen over there and we have the center to everyone are these cards that we're going to be drafting each round now the game is always going to have 12 turns with each round every player is going to have a turn being the first player so in a two-player game there is going to be six rounds because 6 * 2 is 12 and in a three-player game there's going to be four rounds 4 * 3 is 12 and of course

3:04 you got another one for four player game and so each time after everyone's been first player you just keep flipping over this globe until finally uh there are no rounds left and you do your final scoring and you know what one thing I forgot in the setup you can see my cards have some starting tokens so I'm just going to put my starting tokens on there anyway what's going to happen let's say I'm the first player and I'm the ly all right my opponent over here is I think that's a plum but it might be something more specific to the region anyway I'm going to choose a pair of cards so you always have a choice of two terrain cards or two floor and FAA cards or one of each or one of each and I get to choose a pair and keep both of them my opponent opponent gets to choose one let me show you so what I want to do let's just say I want these ones I'm not going to think too hard about this this is just for overview of the rules I would point this piece towards my choice and pick up both cards my opponents all of my opponents get to take one of the cards matching their color so since my opponent is purple they're going to choose either the Trin card or the animal card they can't choose both and if we were playing with a green player and a yellow player they would get to

4:36 choose one card too so let's say my opponent over there chooses this one I'll put that over there now what we're both going to do simultaneously is play these into our city down here the rules for placing Terrain in a city are very simple you can place the card anywhere adjacent to your existing C cards in any way as long as you have one square at least one square touching so I might Place mine like this and expand the rainforest area here um and when I do that I get to place any tokens that are on the card now this card has a house on it let's talk about houses later for now let's talk about one that doesn't have a house this card just has a termid on it so I would put it right here I would put a termite from the supply on the card and now I'm going to play my flora and fauna so there is actually a food chain here the termites are level two on the food chain and they need to eat the wood from the rainforest trees so the color tells us what environment it's in the termites are in the rainforest the fish are in the water

6:09 or in the mangroves over here and then the number tells us where it is on the food chain it also tells us number of victory points at the end of the game and then finally we have the Otters which are level three and they are a wild that will eat anything and live in any or rather it'll live in any environment so this termite is not being supported because it is not in an environment where it can eat uh its food so if this was the end of the game that would end me earn me zero points cuz it's not being supplied any food I will now take this card which has a tree climbing crab on it and place it in such a way that I'm going to try to give it some food so I might place it like like this because what's going to happen is if I place it like that this Reef will be in the water that's where it belongs and that crab is going to be in the mangrove forest where is where it belongs I might be able to do a little bit oh you know I could do better like that because if I do that then the termite is going to be in the forest over here well if that's the case I don't I don't want to grow I would probably want to put this over here because if I'm going to be growing my rainforest then I want to keep my termites together and I can put some trees there later on so I'm going to do that I would put that card right here

7:40 and do a reef and a termite and a crab now right now I have plenty of reef with no fish to eat them I have a crab that is supported because it has its Tree in its own environment and I have two termites that are in this same forest and don't have a tree so neither is supported and in order to support them I need to add more trees there later on in the game now let's suppose I did not play my card like this let's suppose I did play it like this okay so what would happen is I would put the crab there I put the reef there because that's how it's being played and then because that termite is above a space that not not only is it not the environment that it belongs in but it also has something that's already there because it can't go there I have to put it in the compost heap the compost heap is where you put tokens that don't fit and they're going to count against you at the end of the game all right so I wouldn't want to do that I would want to place my card in such a way that I don't have to compost anything and even though these aren't being fed bed yet I have a chance to feed them later on because when my opponent goes maybe I'll be able to get some trees so now that I've made up my mind about how I want to place my cards

9:13 and my opponent has made up his mind I we're going to refresh the board so he'll become first player and he'll pick something else so maybe he'll pick um he probably want some animals cuz he's got all of those terrain cards so he probably pick that and I would end up with this and you can see I would have a choice between two cards here and between the two I would take this one because this one's going to let me play my tree and that's going to help feed those termites that I played earlier I want to go back to something that I skipped earlier I said I would talk about these houses so houses are going to score you three points at the end of the game but thematically this makes a lot of sense they're going to cause destruction to the habitat so in this case playing this card I'm going to have to discard a fish to do so and there is another issue with the house and that is if during the game I have animals next to the house that's that's not good for the environment they need to be in the wilderness so any um animals or Flora or fauna that are going to be next to the house those are going to count against me as well so I could get those points but it is going to cost me so you have to take that into consideration when you're taking those cards now that being said you can

10:44 actually understand the entire scoring of the game you get points for all of the Flora you get fauna that's supported it's either two or three points um those level three they have to be supported by level two which has to be supported by level one got houses you subtract for the compost heap and then finally we have the objectives now objectives is an advanced variant of the game what you can do is you can play out cards of different types you've got one for train you've got another one for uh Flora you've got another one for fauna and during the game whoever is the first person to fulfill an objective they put their player token on that and they get those points at the end of the game and of course you know second player gets eight points third player gets six and so on so you can play that you don't have to there is also a co-op which I I you know I normally wouldn't describe all the the variants but the coop variant is excellent I think it might even be better than the competitive version of the game because in the co-op variant everybody gets dealt these you get dealt a different number in fact this is worth looking up you get dealt a different number of objectives based on the number of players and the intensity of your difficulty and then what you're trying to do is pick your cards and help other

12:15 people get a good pick for themselves so that everyone can satisfy their objectives if you can do that you win but if during the game anybody gets more than five cards in their compost heap everybody immediately loses I think it's a fantastic Cooperative mode so before I started filming this video I was like you know I think mechanics is probably like an eight I mean it's high but it's probably not perfect score but as I describe these rules and I'm reminded of it I just I want to give it such a high score it's so welld designed I I don't know if I can give it my tan like I oh is it is it a perfect mechanics score this might be a perfect me mechanics score that of a 10 you can see by the components that you know there's lots and lots of these little tokens with um artwork on them I mean it's not like the most impressive artwork but I do like that you don't you don't have to pop these out these came in a bag already popped out for me um you know the the components I I think are pretty average but they're everything you need for the game it it's just I think this is a brilliant piece in order to drive what your choices are but generally I would say that these are basically pretty Average components maybe about a six as far as strategy is concerned this game is right in the

13:45 middle I'd say that you could really think about it with card placement and you can of course take two animal cards or two environment cards or one of each um but as much as you could think about what cards you take take and how you place them the game plays great when you just sort of go with your gut feeling don't think too hard because after all the next round new cards are going to come out and you don't really know what you're going to get so solid five for strategy as far as complexity is concerned that's one of the things I think is brilliant about this game it has rules about how cards can be placed and what exactly forms uh habitat and what happens to animal tiles if they don't go but all of that stuff is very very intuitive if you play a card and the animal doesn't have a place to go well you take the token and you you set it aside it counts against you at the end of the game these things make sense the whole food chain it makes sense so for a game with this many rules I might rate complexity as a four but because of how intuitive it is and how easy it is to teach these rules I think I would even lower that and say complexity is a three all right my final thoughts on rainforest City so I have complex feelings about this because while I love this game we don't play it very much at home and I can tell you why the issue with this game is it's not it's not a very light feeling game it's

15:16 kind of a stressful game as you add more and more animals into your city uh those animals need food and so then you need to worry about getting more food and of course you can't add more food unless you create space for more animals and so even though you're trying to pursue objectives in order to get victory points at the end of the game in order to do that you're constantly adding on more objectives because of course you want to make sure that every animal gets fed and that element of the game the fact that you are always trying to make sure that you feed the animals kind of stresses my family out a little bit that doesn't change the way I feel about this game I love the game I think the design is absolutely brilliant I love the fact that you when when it's your turn you get to take two cards everybody else takes one card and what you choose determines what everyone else's choice is going to be I think that's so smart it keeps things moving and then I'm so impressed with the Elegance of this game's rule set the the mo ation for the game make sense even the fact you know you're placing a house and the house causes you to have to eliminate some other token in your city that makes sense you you even get docked points if your house is next to animals at the end of the game that makes sense I love brilliant games like that where everything just makes sense

16:48 so uh for me that causes me to rank the game very highly excellent flow not a lot of downtime intuitive rules beautiful game excellent components tactile little creatures with artwork on it you know you're not just placing like a brown Cube for a a uh you know a tree or something but you actually have tokens that show the plant on that I think that's wonderful uh the fact that this is actually based on Singapore and that you know there's information about these animals and how they interact with each other in the rule book it's very thoughtful extremely educational my only reservation would be that it might be a type of puzzly game that can be frustrating if your family is going to get attached to the meaning behind the puzzle and that's what's happening in my family right they're getting attached to the animals and so the puzzle frustrates them because they can't solve the puzzle and they want to make sure all the animals get fed and sometime you just can't do that you know you just can't check every single box and that's part of the game um and it can frustrate but I love it but I love it so uh that is how I feel about rainforest city thank you very much