HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest

Tropical rainforests capture my imagination. They’re so different than any climate in the northern US where we live. And they’re full of unusual plants and animals. As one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world, they’re filled with wonder and mystery.

HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest is a puzzley drafting and tile-laying game that up to four players can play in about 30 minutes. Daniel Skjold Pedersen and Asger Harding Granerud designed this game for their imprint Sidekick Games, and The Op distributes it in the USA.

Setup

Each player board is made up of four double-sided mini-boards (marked with a pink, white, red, or blue dot). One player creates a 2×2 layout with their board, then all other players copy them.

Create nine small stacks of flower cards. How big are these stacks? It depends on the player count – but they each provide enough cards for each player to take two turns in a round.

You’ll also need to put all the flower tokens, trees, and animals within reach.

Give the start player the pangolin token.

How to Play

HUTAN is played over nine rounds. The goal of the game is to fill in areas of your personal rainforest with flowers, trees, and animals.

Each round opens with the start player (with the pangolin) revealing one stack of cards, turning them all face up.

Players take turns; each time taking one card and placing its flowers on their board. After the start player chooses their first card, they put down the pangolin token. When chosen, the pangolin acts like a wild, granting a single flower of the player’s choice.

When placing flowers on your board, at least one must be adjacent to an existing flower. And all the flowers placed on a turn must be “connected” (adjacent) to each other.

However! You’re not only placing flowers adjacent to each other, you can (and should!) overlap them.

Flowers Bring Trees and Animals

When you would place a flower on top of one that it matches, you place a tree there, instead.

And if you place a tree on the last flower in a completed, single-color area, you can replace that tree with an animal (of the correct color) if there are any left. Placing an animal allows you to “fertilize” the four orthogonally adjacent spaces, adding flowers or trees in those spaces, as appropriate.

Each player chooses flowers twice in the round. However, the last player is stuck with the last card that is left. They must place those flowers on their board, whether they like it or not.

Scoring

After nine rounds, the game is over and it’s time to score.

• Each tree on a player’s board scores 2 points.
• Each animal scores based on the area it’s in (larger areas are more valuable).
• Every completed area (all squares have a flower, of the same color) scores points. Again, the larger the area, the more points it scores.
• Every incomplete area (at least one flower, but the area is not full – or – not all flowers in the area are the same color) scores negative points. The larger the area, the more points it will subtract.

Who created the best rainforest ecosystem?

But Wait, there’s More!

HUTAN also includes a rule variation for families (no negative points), advanced rules that add “ecosystem” cards for additional chances for points, and a way to play solo.

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a section of the rulebook dedicated to ways to challenge players to try new things. All of these are framed as “achievements” you can mark off in the book. The simplest are Challenges: after playing a game, see if you fulfilled any of these, and select one to check.

Scenarios offer yet another way to challenge yourself: specific board layouts and ecosystem card combinations that work for any player count (including solo). Any player who beats the minimum score requirement can check off this achievement, even if they didn’t win the game.

Lastly, there is another set of rule modifications, for players who want an even more challenging experience. Of course, these will let you mark off more achievements.

Impressions

After a dozen plays, how do I feel about HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest?

Gorgeous

I absolutely love the theming of HUTAN. All of the plants and animals (illustrated gorgeously by Vincent Dutrait) are ones that really live in the Indonesian rainforest. At the end of every game, I have a miniature rainforest model right on my table, full of trees and a few animals poking their heads out.

Fiddly

Those same trees are unfortunately frustrating to deal with in the course of the game. They take up almost half of the box, and I’ve had more than a few fall apart in my hands when I pick them up. I could put a dot of glue on each one, but even that would take a lot of time, and I’m not entirely sure it would solve the problem.

Also, although the idea of flowers growing into trees, and some trees being eaten(?) by animals makes sense, the implementation feels clunky. Take a flower, put it on an existing flower. Remove that flower, place a tree. Remove the tree, place an animal. We often skipped these meaningless in-between steps, but then it was difficult for other players to follow along.

Gently Challenging

I love the tile-laying puzzle that is the core of the HUTAN gameplay. It reminds me of some of my favorite solo games, Sprawlopolis and Grove, where you’re trying to overlap elements in very tight, controlled ways to maximize the points of every single tile.

Each flower can only be overlapped exactly once, and then prevents further development. It’s easy to close off your options without intending to!

But HUTAN allows up to four people to try to solve this puzzle simultaneously. Players get to interact with each other through drafting the flower cards, which means that if there’s a card you REALLY need on the table, you should probably snap it up, even if it means leaving a more “valuable” card on the table for someone else.

Although HUTAN is already very customizable, the Challenges, Scenarios, and Modifications give direction on how to explore different facets of the game. I’ve realized that I really like an achievement system to keep me trying new things, especially for games that I can play solo.

Speaking of Solo Play…

I did enjoy the solo mode, which plays out over 18 total turns just like the multiplayer game. But in solo, each turn offers three cards, and once you pick one, the rest are permanently lost. This felt frustrating, and even more so when I couldn’t ever get a single wild-flower (which would normally be an option with the pangolin).

In a multiplayer game, I would get two chances to pick from the cards on display, allowing me some room to plan my next turn or two.

My personal preference is for more compact solo games than this. So I think I’m more likely to play HUTAN in a group, when it feels worth it to pull out this big box.

Final Impressions

I think that HUTAN is going to be best with older children and adults, who love puzzley, tile-laying games and this rainforest theme. Younger kids are going to get frustrated with the restrictions involved (I know I do!) and how the trees can sometimes fall apart. But the attraction of making a model rainforest is going to be hard to beat.

Ready to build your own miniature rainforest? Get HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest directly from The Op, on Amazon, or at your friendly local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest from The Op for this review.

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