Matthew BaileyGame 24# of the “Now & Then Summer Marathon 2024” is “Forever Home” played with Jack(9) and Toby(6).
“Forever Home” is a really lovely tile-laying, flash-drafting game themed around the idea of training dogs at a dog’s home before selling them off to their forever homes.
When you first set up “Forever Home,” it looks more complicated than it actually is. Once we played a round or two, both boys got the hang of it. Toby, who ended up doing incredibly well, only narrowly came second to me.
Each player gets a grid where they train their dogs and place their tiles. There is a shop where players can buy new tiles or new pattern cards, a commendation set that gives you some endgame scoring, and the rules for the homes that also contribute to endgame scoring, which aren’t randomly selected.
On your turn, you can do one of three actions, and you can perform the same action twice. You can take a dog meeple from the central area to train in your grid and place it wherever you like, take a new training card from the central area and add it to your hand, or move a dog on your shelter grid in any direction.
What you’re essentially trying to do is create patterns of dogs that appear on your training cards. As you create these patterns, you gain reputation points, which contribute to endgame scoring. You also rehome a number of dogs from the pattern you just completed. These can be placed in either the city, the suburbs, the countryside, or the foster home. These placements give you extra scoring conditions at the end of the game, such as having all dogs of different colours in one place, a certain exact number of dogs of a specific colour in another, etc.
Another way of scoring is on the commendation board, where you place meeples at the beginning of the game. This gives you points based on things such as who has the most dogs of one specific colour or who has the most dogs in different types of forever homes. These commendations are randomly set up at the beginning of the game and change.
This continues until the first player has achieved seven cards and is the winner. Interestingly, when we played this game, Jack was actually the first person to finish seven cards, while Toby had only done five at this point. Obviously, Jack expected he was definitely going to win, but actually, Toby had achieved more points from the cards he had finished.
You add up all the points and see who won. There’s also an advanced shelter grid with various icons on it that allow you to do extra things such as moving over other dogs and swapping dogs and training cards with the central area.
I’m not going to talk about it here, but there is also a fairly robust solo game that looks very intriguing, and I intend to play it myself at some point over the summer.
“Forever Home” is a really cute tile-laying puzzle game that has the tile-laying of something like “Bullets” crossed with the way you gain cards much like “Ticket to Ride,” and the endgame scoring system of something like “Draftosaurus.” It all works really well, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. We played it a few times, and both Jack and Toby really enjoyed it, and the game was fairly balanced.
One thing that did come across as potentially needing improvement is that the four different places you can home your dogs didn’t seem quite enough. In at least two to three games, as we got to the end, we had filled up all the high-scoring ones and were simply placing them on the ones that give you one dog per turn. There are multiple ones, and we didn’t use every single type of home scoring condition, but I feel that having five or six different homes might have been a better option, but it’s a fairly small issue.
The components are of really nice quality. The box itself is reasonably sized, and everything is produced really well. I really like the dog meeples used for the commendation board, and I think I would have really liked it if they had taken a similar approach as “Draftosaurus” and actually had all the dog meeples instead of the tokens.
I really like “Forever Home.” The theme is lovely and fits well with the game. The artwork is great, and it’s a good level of complexity once you get going, even though the board does look more complex than it is when you get started.
Birdwood Games is a small company that very kindly gives a portion of its profits to dog shelters. If you think this could be up your alley, I would encourage you to potentially buy it from their own website.
The game is also available on BGA if you’d like to try it out.
Disclaimer: A copy of “Forever Home” was kindly provided by Birdwood Games for the purpose of review. All of our thoughts and opinions are our own, and the retail price has been taken into account when writing this review.
