Canopy Review

Canopy from Weird City Games is a set collection game where players are collecting various flora and fauna from the rainforest. Over three seasons, players will take turns drafting cards from one of the three piles to choose from. You'll have an opportunity to select from left to right, looking at the stack and if you do not want that pile, you simply put it face down and add another card to it and repeat for the other two. If you do not pick up anything, you'll take a card from the deck and put it into your forest floor. Each type of card has different abilities and will score differently. When the season deck is fully depleted, the round will end and players will simultaneously score points for their completed trees and plant sets. Animals will score at the end of the game. You will also get bonus points for having the tallest trees in each round. After the third round, players will do their final scoring and whoever has the most points will win.

The Good: I love the theme of Canopy. As always, I'm a sucker for animal themed nature games and this is no different. Having the opportunity to draft every turn puts in a really nice risk, reward system. If you leave a stack to accumulate more cards you run the risk of the other player taking it but you also might get cards that can hurt you at the end of the day. Some sets will deduct points if you have too many of that kind or you could have too many disease or fire cards which will also force you to discard cards (that can work in your favor, though). This is minor, but I really liked putting the animal tokens on your scored trees. That's good stuff.

The Okay: It's somewhat inconvenient to use tokens to track your score. Especially because you are doing a lot of scoring between rounds, you'll probably run out of the lower denominations a lot quicker than you'd expect. A lot of mental notes needed to be taken when exchanging in order to remember what my score was at that time. Thematically, I like them; functionally, meh. I would have preferred a simple score pad but I probably wouldn't have used that either because I don't like to write on them.

The Not So Good: For as gorgeous as the artwork is and including fun facts about all of the different animals and plants, the iconography left a lot to be desired. I constantly needed to refer to the rulebook about what the cards could actually do because the icons were extremely tricky to understand. The rulebook does a solid job of remedying this by including explanations of the cards but it's not ideal to need to use it all the time.

Final Thoughts: Canopy is an eye catching game with great art and even better gameplay. I mentioned it in my Birdwatcher review that set collection isn't the most exciting thing in the world but I love the way that you collect your sets in this game that it feels rewarding when you complete a big set and their scoring parameters vary enough that the risk of losing points or scoring none is always there. Canopy would be an excellent addition to anyones collection. It's simple enough to teach in five minutes but deep enough that you'll constantly be questioning yourself. It's great.

Thanks to Weird City Games for providing me with a review copy.