A group of sketchy druids has kidnapped mythical creatures to exploit their labor! As primal Spirits, players will recruit allies, cast spells, climb towers to scope out the island, improve their defenses against the druids, and gather their strength to break the beasts out of captivity to get them on submarines off Greenwood. Mechanically, Greenwood's one of those heavy games that give players thirty things to do, and then find the microefficiencies between them to tease out as many points as they can. I would be worried it'll be overmuch, but it's got a Lacerdaesque magic of tying everything together into a neat thematic bundle such that it easily slides into your brain.
Each of Greenwood's three rounds starts with players moving their blocker token and taking the other unblocked free actions, like blocking one of the druids’ penalty cards. Then they'll cast many spells as they've advanced on their aura track (the smallest, but by no means least important of Greenwood's tracks). The meat of the game is the night actions phase, where you drop your workers onto your cards, or use your spies on other players' already used cards to use them yourself. You'll need to climb towers to go up the way under track so you can move further on the map to reach the higher-scoring creatures. You'll need to go up the strength track so you can hold more study tokens (gained by discarding cards) so you can meet the more complex requirements to free the big point creatures. Every creature you free is also a polyomino on your submarine board, which gives bonuses when certain spaces and patterns are covered. It seems like too much to do in three rounds, until you start chaining all the little bonuses together, or assemble a degenerate combination of worker placement cards. But that's just the basic game.
I fully expect the advanced mode to be Greenwood's big draw, where everybody gets an asymmetric faction during setup, and then tosses their faction’s cards together to make the deck. I noticed myself gravitating to certain types of cards in the game we played, so I'm eager to explore how I approach a game without them available. We also only played the most basic submarine board, which gave out bonuses whenever you filled a column, but there are four in the box that all demand different patterns for rewards. I'm holding off any judgement until I've got a copy in my hands and can do a proper review, but four players picking from seven different factions with variable setup guarantees every game will be different. It's slated for an Essen release with concurrent Stateside availability, and I can't wait to start really exploring the island.
