Woodland Rush

Woodland Rush is a fast-paced game of timed turns, designed by Wesley Zhao. It’s for 2-4 players ages 5-99 and takes around 15 minutes to play.

It’s a part of a new line of kids’ games from Chip Theory. We already reviewed the dexterity game Octo Grabbo, and we’ll be covering Bear in Mind (a memory and storytelling game) soon.

How To Play

Woodland Rush is a series of mini-games, randomly selected through drawing cards. On your turn, everyone counts down together, then someone flips the timer. As soon as the timer is running, you flip the top card off the deck. Do the corresponding activity, then flip another card and do that, too. Keep flipping cards and doing their activities until the one-minute timer runs out.

The youngest player takes the first turn.

The Activities

If you draw a “Go Home” card, move the animal pawns to the creature dens board. Put each one onto its numbered den as shown on the card.

If the card has a tree, stack these wooden pieces to match the pattern shown on the card, either one or two trees with the pieces in a specific order.

A Food Match card shows a nut or berries. Flip over a pair of food tiles – do they both match what’s pictured? If not, flip them face-down again and choose a different pair. Keep choosing until you find BOTH food tiles that match the card.

If the card has a single character on it, you need to copy their funny face or do the full-body action they demonstrate.

A Hide-and-Seek card has three of the four characters on it. EVERYONE can race to grab the pawn representing the animal that’s MISSING from the card. Whoever grabbed the right pawn gets this card, even if it wasn’t their turn!

There are also cards that add or subtract from your leaf points, and the racoon robber, who allows you to take a card from another player’s pile.

Lastly, there’s a sand timer card – if you reveal this, take it and keep it to use later, flipping the sand timer back over to get you more time!

Time’s Up!

When the timer runs out, take the current (unfinished) task card and put it at the bottom of the deck. Keep the rest of the cards you successfully completed this turn, and pass the deck to the next player. Reset and shuffle the food tiles, and make sure everything is in reach for the next player.

After a pre-decided number of turns, the game ends. Every player adds up the leaf points on the top edge of all the cards they’ve collected, and the player with the most points wins!

Impressions

On first glance, I was really looking forward to trying Woodland Rush. It looked really fun to try a bunch of different mini-games.

There are lots of different kinds of tasks involved here – matching, dexterity, memory, logic, and following instructions. And the combination of the timer and group participation on the Hide-and-Seek task means that no one has time to get bored.

The variety of tasks kept Woodland Rush fun even when we played with just teens and adults. But we accidentally broke the game. On his second round, one player revealed both sand timer cards from the deck, which allowed him to flip the sand timer TWICE. Used strategically, this allowed him enough time to run through the entire remaining deck of cards, and we were unable to give anyone else a turn.

And because of the timer, Woodland Rush isn’t great for a group of players at different abilities. The rulebook suggests letting younger players run through the timer twice on each turn, but that’s still not enough for a younger kid to catch up to a competitive older sibling.

The younger kids who played the game definitely enjoyed it, but not as much as the other two Chip Theory Kids games we tried. Unlike those games, I’d recommend Woodland Rush ONLY if you’re going to play it with a group of kids who are close in age and ability.

This game would work very well in an educational context, like indoor recess or small groups. It could also be used as a jumping-off point to talk about how animals survive the winter through hibernation, adaptation, camouflage, and/or migration.

As a family game, Woodland Rush is a fun way to fill a few minutes. But I’d probably stick with a single round with only a single turn on the timer for all but the youngest players.

Get Woodland Rush directly from Chip Theory Games or ask for it at your local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Woodland Rush from Chip Theory Games for this review.

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