Review of Forestry: Growing Forward – A Little Bit of Everything

There seems to be a trend of more often doing expansions again. Maybe it’s a real one, maybe just a perceived one. But Underwater Cities got its Data Era, Anno 1800 its excellent “Die Erweiterung” (of which an English version sadly never saw the light of day), even Splendor Duel unexpectedly got a mini-expansion called The Counterfeiters. For a while, the common wisdom seemed to be that it’s much more sensible to put all the effort needed to properly design and playtest an expansion into designing new games rather than an expansion for an existing one, and likely that is still true. But from a gamer’s perspective, expansions are a great reason to get a game one already owns and likes back to the table. The obvious question with an expansion is always what type of expansion it is: a fix for some imbalance or short coming of the base game? Just more of what there was before? Or something that elevates a game beyond what it was? In the case of Forestry: Growing Forward, it seems to be a…