“Develop your small, glass-making domain in the woods of the Black Forest.”
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/420805/black-forest
Playing Time: 60-120 Minutes
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Weird Dial Manipulation
Designer: Tido Lorenz, Uwe Rosenberg
Players: 1-4
Some observers have said that Black Forest is a slightly meaner rework of Glass Road, but I can’t speak to that. What I can say is that I spent most of the last day of BGG.con fighting to get my hands on a copy and it’s the first Uwe Rosenberg game I’ve loved in a long time.
Players travel from village to village, placing their meeple in between two tradespeople. Each tradesperson does different things but most commonly they will grant or convert resources, and the player can activate both neighboring tradespeople. The player also has a limited ability to move tradespeople around, creating more desirable locations (or making life more difficult in the process). The resources they get are used primarily to complete projects and build buildings, which can offer powerful abilities as well as grand end game victory points.
But the real center of the experience are the wheels where resources are tracked. Players have two wheels, one focused on making food and one glass. As players spend resources, they are spent from the wheel. But when players GAIN resources, they may actually autocreate resources. If you have all the resources you need to make glass – and aren’t full of glass, then you turn the dial and one glass is automatically created. It’s a very neat twist on resource management which, when combined with the very dynamic worker placement locations, makes for a very novel game experience.
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