Wispwood Board Game Review
- Steve Godfrey
- 5 hours ago
- 7 min read
WBG Score: 8
Player Count: 1-4
Published by: CGE
Designed by: Reed Ambrose
This is a review copy. See our review policy here
By Steve Godfrey
There are many things that can be described using the term Wisp. The game Wispwood is of course referring to the will-o-the-wisps that emerge in the forest to conceal or reveal paths. It conjures such lovely ethereal images in the mind. Unfortunately for this reviewer the closest definition of a wisp I get is the last few wisps of hair that are clinging on to head for dear life. The only similarity of course is that both the wisps and my head both glow in the light!
How to go for a wisp in the woods
Fit together the wisp board in a random order and populate it with 8 wisps. Then shuffle and draw 1 card from each objective type and put them face up for everyone to see. Give each player a face down tree tile and a cat token on top of it. Place the rest of the tree tokens in face down piles.
On your turn you’ll take one of the wisps from the board. When you do you’ll look at the two shapes on either side of it, choose one and take enough face down tree tokens to be able to make that shape in front of you including the wisp tile you just took. You’ll then place that shape in front of you. You can rotate the shape anyway you need and the wisp tile can go anywhere in that shape. The shape can go anywhere as long as at least one side of a tile is fully touching another one you’ve already placed. Here’s the real restrictions though. In the first round you can only make up a 4x4 grid, the second round a 5x5 and the third a 6x6. You also have to be aware of the scoring cards on the table as each type of wisp and the tree tiles will have their own scoring conditions. The Witch objective card is the only one that will dictate where it’s Wisp MUST be placed and generally it’s to do with its vicinity to the cat token.
At the start of your turn you have the option of using your cat token. You can flip it to either replace and refill all of the wisps on the board or you can use it to take a wisp but choose any shape around the board. You then take your turn as normal.
As an alternative to taking a wisp you can take a tree action. Here you simply take one, two or three face down tree tiles and place them in any empty spaces on your board. This is good for filling in those odd spaces. This action will also let you refresh your cat token for you to use in a future turn.
The round will end when one person has completely filled their grid. At which point play goes round until it goes back to the first player. Players will now score each objective card. These are all different for each type of wisp, Once scoring is done players will then have the option of moving their cat token to another face down tree tile. Then everyone removes all of their tree tiles from their grid leaving the wisps where they were. The main board stays in the same state as it was and play starts again only this time players can now build out to a 5x5 grid and in the third round a 6x6 grid.
The game ends after three rounds and the player with the most points wins.
Is it a wood or a forest?
As seems to be the trend these days, Wispwood is one of those lovely, puzzly games that has a deceptively pretty theme wrapped around it so as to entice gamers like a moth to a flame. It pulls you in with its neon looking wisps (which apparently look good under a blacklight) and oddly included cats and then smacks you in the face with a different kind of polyomino puzzle. It’s one that all at once feels really tight but also really freeing in how it works and the choices it presents to you. With a regular polyomino game you get your shape. “there it is, this is how we printed it, you figure it out” In Wispwood the fact that you can put your wisp anywhere in that shape is huge. It may not seem like it at the time but that freedom can make all the difference between a big score and no score at all for that placement and all because you can move that wisp one square as opposed to a set place in a tile. With five objective cards out on the table you’ll need that freedom. These cards come in two difficulty levels and I would highly recommend choosing cards with just the one paw on for your first games. My advice would be to choose the ones that everyone can understand without too much trouble. This also helps for scoring as well.
Whatever you choose there’s going to be so many ways to score and so much to take into consideration when building out your grid. It can quite easily lead to players frantically looking back and forth from their grid, to the objectives and to the display of wisps and back to their grid again. Yep the chance for neck pain is high in this one which is exactly why I'm lobbying to have pots of Tiger Balm to be added to each copy (other muscle soothing brands are available and we at What Board Game are not sponsored by Tiger Balm… yet?)
The game does say you can pick your objective cards at random. Personally I’d hand pick them because some of them can be tricky to get your head round, even for seasoned players and too many of these types of objectives in play at the same time could cause players to be laying in crumpled heaps of the floor by the end of the game.
The one advantage of so many objectives is that at least you’ve got some choice and can pivot strategies if a particular type of wisp isn’t coming out. The game has also thrown in a couple of safeguards to stop thing becoming too stale. Being able to swap out wisps when there’s only one type left can be a blessed relief. There's also a handy Mitigation Kitten you can use (that's not what its called in the rules but I just thought of it and i'm also going to lobby for that to be added to the rules…..in exchange for royalties obviously) Your cat is a great tool to help with any problematic situations you may find yourself in……if you’ve remembered to refresh it that is. Not having it available when you really need it can be, oh lets call it frustrating.
One thing I really appreciate in Wispwood is the way they’ve incorporated what could have been seen as a dead turn in a lot of games, into something that’s worth doing. Tree turns are not the “well I suppose I’ll have to do this then” that they could easily have been. Not only does it bring your kitty out of hiding (why does that sentence feel weird) but it goes towards filling your grid, which gives you extra points if you do. Not only that but they’ve made tree tiles an objective. It’s a simple fix that’s gives meaning to something that could have easily been seen as “negative space”, I’ll be honest, I do kinda forget the tree scoring objective but the fact that I can do that, still have them score, something and not feel like its effected my game is a bonus.
It’s a fiddly Forrest…..or wood?
There can be a fiddliness to Wispwood, but with some fixes, it can be toned down. First, this isn’t just a spatial puzzle; it can be a dexterity game as well. Since you need to remove any tree tiles on your board at the end of each round, it can feel a bit nerve-wracking as you try not to flick your wisps across the table like you're playing a game of ice cool. This is escalated if you use the provided grid template properly, which keeps everything tight together. My advice: spread the grid out a bit and save some room for your fingers. While we’re on the subject of advice, I’d say get yourself a cloth bag for the tree tiles. Mixing up the tree tiles during setup and then flipping the resulting mess face down and putting them in piles I found to be a pain, unless everyone else is chipping in. I know you’ll sometimes see what is on the flip side of a tile as you pull it out to use as a tree tile. There are so many tree tiles that unless you’ve got someone counting every wisp that comes out and calculating the odds, I don’t think that will matter too much, plus it’ll make setup a lot quicker, especially if you’re playing solo.
Let's talk about scoring, which can cause the biggest amount of fiddliness. There's five objective and multiple different objective cards for each wisp and varying difficulty.. That means that scoring can get convoluted and confusing. So much so that it's easy for people to miscalculate their scores. I know that's the case because of the app!. CGE have released a scoring app for Wispwood and it is a god send. Not least because it speeds the scoring phase up exponentially. You select all the objective cards you're using, the app accesses your camera which you hold over your grid and it sees where everything is and it scores for you. I know people make mistakes because they've tried to score their grid (and were unsure they got it right) so I checked with the app and they'd missed a few points from their score. So it's worth getting to speed the game up. At the time of writing it's not perfect since it can only score one player's grids. So if you want to do everyone then you need to keep flicking back and forth. It’s still quicker and more accurate than manual scoring though. Hopefully they'll have an update to change that soon. I’m not letting the integration of the app affect my score here purely because I know not everybody will use the app.
Wispwood can easily sit in the pantheon of games that you’ll happily pull out to teach new gamers, but with that decent array of goal cards and the varying difficulty I can easily see this one holding up to the longevity that others like Cascadia have had.
Right, I’m off to have a lie down. I’ve just spent the last few hours following wisps round the woods, trying to find my cat. Then I realised that I don’t own a cat!
