Wildwoods

In Wildwoods, you play as a forest child and her bear companion who set out to heal the forest and its creatures from an ancient curse of despair. You win the game by exploring several fantastical locations and lifting the curse – before you are hunted down by the shadow.

Wildwoods provides a challenging, immersive solo experience and comes with narrative art design and a modular dashboard with large, interchangeable location sheets. At the core of the game is a rotating card mechanic in which you roll dice to perform actions such as Explore, Heal, Focus, Interact and Connect. Activated cards are placed at the end of your rotating river of cards, where they will become more difficult to perform – so choose your actions wisely!

As you play, your river of cards will also be clogged up with creatures and traps, which will block your action slots and take away your spiritual health if you leave them unchallenged. So which actions do you play, in what order do you play them, and how many dice do you spend? And how do you keep your river of cards clean and efficient?

One way to do this, is by performing the Cure action, which lets you discard creatures and claim their rewards. But in order to advance, you need to engage with your surroundings. Use your Interact action to perform one of many location-specific abilities, your Explore action to look for boons, and your Connect action to ask the help of allied wood critters. Also, make sure to keep your spirit up and to illuminate your path with the Light action, before you are forced to draw a fateful Shadow card…

Your goal is to make it to the final location and to banish the ancient curse. If you achieve this before you run out of shadow cards, you will have saved the forest - and you win the game.

Wildwoods is for you, if you like narrative, card-driven adventures such as Arkham Horror LCG and Aftermath, if you enjoy an interplay between strategic card management and the balancing of resources and luck, and if you appreciate a mythological fantasy setting.