A game for 1 – 5 players
Play time around 20 – 45 minutes
The Publisher is Birdwood Games
Introduction
In Forever Home, you and your friends are working in a local animal shelter. You’re caring for dogs while they are waiting to find their forever home.
During the game you’ll training pups to prepare them for their new lives. When the training is completed, you’ll pair them with their new family.
You can score points for completing training cards, finding a dog a new home and competing shelter commendations.
Let’s get it on the table
Place the commendation/ challenge board in the middle of the table and place 1 of each dog meeple random on this board.
The home cards are divided into 4 categories. Shuffle these cards in 4 separate tiles and pick one from each of the categories and place them on top of the commendation board. Shuffle the training cards and reveal 4 cards by 2 and 3 people and 5 cards by 4 and 5 players.
Shuffle the dog tokens and take as many dog tokens as there are training cards open on the table.
Each player receives a shelter board, every player plays with the same site. For your first games, you can play with the regular side. When you’re more experienced, you can play with the advanced shelter. Every player also receives 2 training cards. Create a pool of dog tokens, for every player 2 tokens and every layer takes one by one.
A game of Forever Home ends when a player has completed 7 training cards, then the round continues till every player has played the same number of turns.
On your turn you get to play two out of three possible actions.
Action 1: Take one of the four or five dog tokens available on the table. Replace this token with a new dog token from the bag, you can’t take a token from the bag. Place the dog token directly on your shelter.
Action 2: Take an open training card from the table. Replace this card with a new card, you can’t take a card from the deck of cards.
Action 3: Move 1 dog token on your Shelter 1 space in any direction.
You can score points on different ways.
Home cards; these cards can be different with each game unless the foster home. Each of the other home cards have unique requirements to score points. Some cards just give points for a set of 3 the same dogs, for each collection of 4 different dogs etc. At the end of the game, you will score these points.
Training cards; These cards represent tricks, training and socializing you’re doing with your dogs in your shelter. You can complete a card at your turn, and this doesn’t count as an action. To complete a card, you must have the patterns that’s on the training card on your shelter. The light brown with dark brown dogs must be the same dog type, when you see dark brown with light brown dogs then these must be a single different dog type.
When you complete a card, you maybe can move dogs into one of the houses. On the top left of the training card, you see the number of dogs that can be graduated from the shelter to a house. This can be different houses but once you moved a dog, it can’t be moved again!
On the right bottom of the card, you see how many points you get for this card at then end of the game.
Commendation board: there are three types of an award. One for the most dogs in training, for the most dogs rehomed and for a specific dog across the different homes.
The Game ends
A game ends when a player has completed 7 training cards. Then the round continues till every player has played the same number of turns.
You can use the scorepad and marks the score on this pad, you can score points for
– Reputation from completed training cards
– Reputation from meeting each home card’s requirement
– Reputation from the commendation board.
The player with the most reputation has won this game of Forever Home!
Final Conclusion & rating
Difficulty: 2.00/ 5
Re-playability: 8
My score: 8 out of 10 dice
Forever Home contains very nice and beautiful artwork, the theme is very well developed in this and therefore already very fun to start playing. The icons and graphics are clear and don’t need much explanation. In the rules, everything is well explained and worked out and the game is therefore quick to play, in the rules there are plenty of pictures with clear explanations of what you can find where on the cards.
Forever Home is a family game and, thanks to the simple rules, easy to understand for everyone. The game rules also make it great fun to play with the whole family, players can quickly immerse themselves in the game. Forever Home is an abstract puzzle game where you will place tiles and try to complete training cards. Each turn, each player has two actions to complete, these may be the same actions or two different actions. Despite being a puzzle game, you can get in each other’s way a bit, although this is not often on purpose but more because another player wants to get that one piece of the puzzle or that training card. As a result, you sometimes have interaction but really in a friendly way.
A game of Forever Home takes about 30 minutes on average; if you are with two players, you can even play the game in about 20 minutes. The nice thing about this game is that it is very addictive, and you want to play another game quickly. The game contains enough options to keep replayability high, you have several home cards you can use, and the stack of training cards is also huge.
If you eventually want a bit more of a challenge, that’s also possible and you flip the game boards for the more difficult version. On this grid are actions to be performed as soon as you place a token there.
Another huge plus point, at least in my opinion, and that is that Forever Home can also be played solo. For the solo game, you use the action cards for the solo game and turn over the game board with the commendation/ challenge board. You don’t place dogs on this board at the beginning of the game, but you always do so at the end of a round. After placing the last dog, you can continue playing but it costs minus points but gives you the opportunity to perform additional actions.
The beautiful artwork by Dann May & Dominique Vassie once again ensures that there is a great game on the table with a friendly theme and beautiful artwork. Forever Home is therefore the ideal game for during family evenings and I can definitely recommend this game!
My thanks go to Birdwood Games and the opportunity to review Forever Home.
