Let’s look at Black Forest, an euro board game masterpiece and prepare to travel across time and timber. This 2024 release comes to us from the esteemed publisher Feuerland Spiele, with Capstone Games handling the English edition. The game is the brainchild of the legendary Uwe Rosenberg, known for his resource management masterpieces, who teams up with co-designer Tido Lorenz, bringing a fresh perspective to the table.
Overview of Black Forest
Black Forest is a one—to four-player board game that transports the players back to 13th-century Germany, where they’ll establish glassmaking empires amidst towering pines and shadowy glades. As a spiritual successor to Rosenberg’s Glass Road, this game takes the core concept of resource wheels and expands it into a full-fledged worker placement extravaganza. Players will navigate a modular board, construct buildings, and manipulate their production wheels in a delicate dance of efficiency and timing.
With its blend of historical theme and crunchy economic gameplay, Black Forest promises to satisfy history buffs and Euro game enthusiasts alike. But before explaining the mechanics, let’s take a moment to appreciate the physical manifestation of this woodland wonder.
Components of the Game
This is where the game board shows uniqueness, so let’s see what awaits us. The box doesn’t have slots for components, which we don’t like, but it isn’t a big deal. Instead, it is well sorted with the cardboard cutout.
Game Board
Of course, we start with the main part – the centerpiece, its double-sided game board featuring a sprawling map of the Black Forest region. One side caters to solo play, while the other accommodates 2-4 players. The board is a feast for the eyes, with beautifully illustrated villages, winding paths, and lush forest landscapes. It’s not just pretty – the board is functionally designed with clear spaces for workers, job cards, and resource tracking. The image on the left shows the solo-player game board, and the right-side image shows the 2-4-player game board.
Production Tableaus
Each player receives a personal production tableau, the heart of their glassmaking operation. These dual-layered boards feature two ingenious resource wheels – one for glassmaking and one for cooking. The wheels are a tactile joy to manipulate, with satisfying clicks as you rotate them. The dual-layer design ensures your resource markers stay put, even if the table gets bumped.
Glass Huts and Progress Trackers
The glass huts are charming wooden pieces that represent your main glassmaking facility. They come with accompanying progress trackers that move up a track on your tableau, marking your advancement in glassmaking art. When you reach the top, you expand your domain – a clever visual representation of your growing empire.
Building Tiles
Black Forest boasts an impressive array of 36 small and 14 large building tiles. These double-sided cardboard pieces are thick and durable, with clear iconography on one side and evocative artwork on the other. The buildings range from simple clay pits to grand manors, each offering unique benefits and scoring opportunities.
Landscape Tiles
Expand your domain with various landscape tiles – fields, ponds, pastures, and forests. These sturdy cardboard tiles fit snugly on your player board and the additional estate tiles you’ll acquire throughout the game.
Resource Markers
A colorful assortment of wooden discs represents your various resources—from essential goods like wood and sand to refined products like glass, provisions, and commodities. The color-coded markers and feature stickers for easy identification make resource management a breeze.
Meeples and Pawns
Each player gets a set of wooden meeples in their color to represent workers and other game elements. The pawns used for worker placement are satisfyingly chunky, making them easy to grasp and move around the board.
Job Cards
A deck of job tiles adds variety and additional objectives to each game. These tiles are printed on quality cardstock with clear illustrations, representing various tasks and opportunities in the Black Forest. For example, the tiles can include “Feudal Lord” (requiring players to spend specific landscape tiles), “Market” (allowing players to exchange livestock for resources), and “Builder” (rewarding players with free building if they provide the required resources). These diverse jobs offer unique challenges and rewards, keeping each playthrough fresh and exciting.
How To Setup Black Forest
It’s time to set up this remarkable board game. Think of it as constructing your miniature medieval village on your table!
The image below shows you the complete setup of the board game:
Step One
First, let’s lay the foundation. Lay out the game board in the center of the table, choosing the side that matches your player count. You’ll want the side with the charming cuckoo clock symbol for solo play, while group games use the other side. This board is your window into the Black Forest, with its winding paths and bustling villages waiting to be explored.
Step Two
You can’t leave it like that, so start by populating your forest with opportunities! Take the two larger building boards for small buildings and arrange them near the main board. Here’s where things get interesting: you’ll place all 36 small buildings on these boards, but only after adding a dash of randomness. Flip 10 of these buildings to their ‘B‘ side before placing them all according to their numbers. This ensures that no two games of Black Forest will ever be quite the same!
Step Three
Place the board for large buildings nearby, making sure to use the side that matches your player count. Then, sort the large building tiles by their Roman numeral backs, shuffle each stack, and place them face-up on the corresponding spaces. These imposing structures will be the crown jewels players vie for throughout the game.
Step Four
Every village needs its tradespeople, and Black Forest is no exception. Sort the tradesperson tiles by their backs, shuffle each stack, and then populate the five villages on the board with these skilled workers. Once they’re all in place, flip them face-up. Your forest is now teeming with coopers, glassblowers, and other medieval artisans!
Step Five
Shuffle the job tiles and place them face-down on the designated space on the board. As the game progresses, these will be revealed, offering players enticing opportunities to prove their worth.
Step Six
Now, players have to establish their domains. Each player takes a production tableau with resource wheels that they’ll adjust throughout the game. They’ll also gather their starting resources, place their main estate board to the right of their tableau, and set up their initial glass hut with its progress tracker.
Final Step
The final touches involve distributing starting landscape tiles to each player’s estate, choosing player colors, and determining the first player. In a two-player game, you’ll also place a neutral pawn on the board, adding an extra strategic element to navigate.
The player setup should look like this:
As you complete these steps, you’ll see that the table has transformed into a microcosm of Medieval Germany. The forests are lush, the villages are bustling, and the air is thick with the potential for glassmaking greatness. With everything in its place, you’re ready to embark on your Black Forest adventure!
How Does Black Forest Work – Game Mechanics
Here, we will explain the Game Mechanics and how they work from start to end, and of course, our opinion on them. Let’s start first with the turn structure. Each turn in Black Forest is a three-act strategy and resource management play.
Commodity Phase
First, players have the option to spend a commodity to move the traveling merchant, a clever mechanism that allows for board manipulation reminiscent of the worker placement twists in games like Keyflower. This action can dramatically alter the options, adding delightful adaptability to your strategies.
The Movement Phase
Players must move their workers to a new location, either within the same village or to a different one, by spending precious provisions. This creates a fascinating spatial puzzle as you balance the need to access specific actions against the cost of travel. It’s a mechanic that would make even the most seasoned Uwe Rosenberg fans nod in appreciation.
Finally, players perform one or two actions at their chosen location. These actions are the heart of the game, and we’ll talk about them in a minute.
Resource Management and Production Wheels
At the core of Black Forest lies its innovative resource management system, centered around two production wheels on each player’s tableau. These wheels, reminiscent of the resource dials in Uwe Rosenberg’s earlier game, Glass Road, are a stroke of genius. The wheel mechanism’s looks kind of remind us of Finca, where you pick up resources, only this time, the resources are on the wheel instead of wooden components. This clever mechanic saves a lot of downtime.
The left wheel focuses on glassmaking resources (wood, sand, water, coal, and glass), while the right wheel manages cooking resources (meat, porridge, coal, provisions, and commodities). As you gain and spend resources, you’ll rotate these wheels. When certain conditions are met – specifically, when all of the basic resource markers are above zero – the wheel automatically produces, converting essential resources into more valuable refined goods.
This system creates a fascinating timing puzzle. Players must carefully manage their resources to trigger productions at opportune moments, a mechanic that adds depth and rewards forward-thinking. Also, instead of trading the basic resources and gaining produced ones, players simply turn the wheel until it hits the first resource marker, and the values change themselves.
Actions
Upon reaching a village, players can visit two adjacent tradespeople or complete a job. Each tradesperson offers unique benefits, from resource gathering to building construction. The dual-action possibility in villages creates delicious decision points as players weigh the benefits of different action combinations. The actions available in Black Forest are as varied as the forest itself.
Visit Tradespeople
When your worker lands between two tradespeople in a village, you can activate one or both of their abilities—from gaining resources to constructing buildings or advancing your glass hut. The combo potential here is immensely satisfying.
Complete Jobs
Jobs are another way to score points and gain resources. When the arrow hits the resource reminder tile, one job is placed on the board and can be completed by moving to their location and meeting the requirements. It’s a race to grab the best jobs before your opponents! The number of available jobs matches the number of players who have reached this milestone. For instance, in a four-player game, four jobs will be available simultaneously on the board once all players have moved their reminder tiles.
Jobs can be claimed by traveling to their specific locations and fulfilling their requirements, creating an engaging race among players to secure the most valuable opportunities. When a player completes a job, they immediately gain its rewards, and a new job is revealed to replace it, maintaining a constant number of available opportunities. This creates a dynamic economy of possibilities, where players must carefully balance the cost of traveling to these locations against their potential rewards. Each completed job is removed from the game permanently, adding weight to the decision of when and which jobs to pursue.
Construct Buildings
Buildings are a vital source of points and ongoing abilities. The variety of buildings available ensures that no two games feel the same, and the strategy of which buildings to prioritize adds significant depth to the game.
Expand Your Domain
As your glass hut progresses, you’ll expand your domain by adding new estate boards. This provides more space for buildings and resources, crucial for scaling up your operations. When your Glass Hut Progress tracker reaches the top of its track, you immediately gain a new Small Estate tile. This tile comes with two Forests and several empty spaces for additional buildings or landscape tiles. Each expansion gives you more room to grow and scores you points, representing your increasing influence in the Black Forest region.
Manage Livestock
Cows and pigs can be acquired and housed in pastures, forests, and stables. They’re a source of meat for the cooking wheel and can score points at the game’s end if stored on pastures. Here, ‘how it works,’ The cows can only be stored in stables or pastures. The pigs, on the other hand, go on forests or pastures. The pasture can not hold both types at the same time.
Game End and Scoring
The game end is triggered when a player’s provision (food/purple) marker reaches a specific point on their cooking wheel (shown in the image). After a final round, points are tallied from various sources: glass produced, cooking wheel position, estates acquired, livestock, buildings, and end-game scoring effects, which are calculated through the Player Aid.
The Alchemy of Glassmaking – Mastering the Production Wheels
Playing Black Forest, we’ve been utterly amazed by the game’s crown jewel: the production wheels. These ingenious contraptions are not just a clever nod to the game’s glassmaking theme; they’re the beating heart of its economic engine and possibly why Black Forest has been hailed as the #1 board game of 2024.
We first noticed the wheels’ uniqueness during our second game. As we rotated the dials, watching resources disappear and reappear, we realized we were witnessing a miniature economic ecosystem. The moment when all basic resource markers are above zero, triggering automatic production, never fails to elicit a collective gasp of excitement from our gaming group.
It’s a delicate balancing act – push too hard for immediate gains, and you might disrupt your long-term production cycle. Hold back too much, and you risk falling behind your opponents.
This mechanic brilliantly simulates the ebb and flow of a medieval economy, where resources are consumed to produce goods and fuel further production. We’ve rarely seen this level of economic simulation executed so elegantly in board games.
While Glass Road, Black Forest’s spiritual predecessor, introduced the concept of these production wheels, we feel that Black Forest has perfected the mechanism. The increased complexity and interplay with the expanded worker placement elements create a richer, more satisfying experience.
It’s no wonder Black Forest has been hailed as the #1 board game of 2024. The production wheels, the game’s strategic options, and the beautiful presentation create an unmatched gaming experience. Critics and players alike have praised its ability to offer a balance between beginner-friendly mechanics and strategic depth for veterans.
Highs and Lows – Our Black Forest Experience
Things We Love
- No wonder the first thing that caught our eye was the production wheels; they are a stroke of genius. We were mesmerized by the constant give and take of resources, creating a satisfying rhythm to our turns. It’s like conducting an economic orchestra!
- The sheer variety of buildings in each game kept us returning for more. We particularly enjoyed the “Tannery” building, which turned our leftover pigs into a surprising source of end-game points.
- The tension of timing our glass hut expansions was intense. We’ll never forget the collective gasp when Tijana expanded her domain just before nabbing a crucial job card.
- The artwork is simply stunning. We spent far too much time admiring the intricate details on the tradesperson tiles, and the glassblower’s determined expression became a running joke in our group.
Things That Gave Us Pause
- While we appreciated the depth, Having so many options was very confusing. It took us a complete game to feel comfortable with all the buildings and their functions. Thankfully, they are all organized by the resources they produce, making things a bit easier.
- The two-player variant with the neutral pawn felt forced. We longed for the more organic competition of our three and four-player games.
- Storage became an issue. After our third game, fitting everything back into the box felt like solving a particularly frustrating puzzle. We eventually resorted to a custom foam insert.
- The abundance of choice sometimes led to analysis paralysis, especially in the late game. Our friend Mike’s turns started to rival the lifespan of a medieval glassworks!
Final Thoughts – A Journey Through the Black Forest
As we pack away the last of the building tiles and carefully align the resource wheels for storage, we can’t help but reflect on our journey with Black Forest. From our first encounter with the game at Essen Spiel Day 1, this creation from Uwe Rosenberg and Tido Lorenz has left an indelible mark on our gaming group.
There were a bunch of people playing Black Forest. It was the main show of that hall, and no wonder it was. Black Forest exemplifies what Uwe Rosenberg does best—creating intricate economic simulations that somehow manage to be brain-burning. It’s a hallmark of his designs, seen in classics like Agricola and Caverna, but it feels more refined and focused here. The production wheels, mainly, are a stroke of genius that will influence game design for years.
One of our most memorable moments came during our fifth playthrough when our colleague Vanco, usually the analysis paralysis poster child, pulled off a stunning combo. He managed to trigger three production cycles in a single turn, converting a mountain of sand into a glittering pile of glass and victory points. He also collected all the jobs.
The game can be overwhelming for newcomers. The sheer number of options available each turn can lead to decision paralysis. We’ve introduced new players with a “starter” setup, limiting the available buildings to ease them into the game’s depths. It’s a testament to the game’s design that it remains engaging and strategic even with this simplified setup.
Black Forest sits comfortably alongside other heavy economic games like Brass Birmingham, but its unique production wheel mechanism and the thematic integration of its medieval glassmaking setting set it apart. Fans of Rosenberg’s other works will find familiar elements—the tight resource management of Agricola and the spatial puzzle of A Feast for Odin—combined in a fresh and exciting way.
We particularly appreciate how the game encourages players to specialize while remaining flexible. In one memorable match, Angelina focused entirely on meat production, converting it into Bricks and wood by a special building. The risky strategy paid off spectacularly because this allowed her to gain even more buildings since they all required some combination of wood and bricks. This demonstrates the game’s capacity for varied play styles.
As we close the box on another session, already planning our following strategies, we’re reminded of why we fell in love with board gaming in the first place. Black Forest isn’t just a game – it’s an experience, a journey, a story we create together around the table. And in the end, isn’t that what great games are all about?
So, whether you’re a Rosenberg fan or a newcomer to heavy Euros, we wholeheartedly recommend giving Black Forest a try. Just be prepared – once you enter these woods, you may be reluctant to leave. Happy gaming, and may your glass huts always prosper!
