Become a wildlife photographer

As you might know Sit Down! Games always publishes very unique and different games. ☺️ 📸 Redwood is no exception. It is about nature photography; moving your photographer around, lining up photos to create beautiful panorama pictures depicting the trees 🌲, flowers 🌷 and wildlife 🐾. Redwood is undoubtedly one of the most unconventional games I have seen. Why? Because it is a game of estimations. This description probably only makes you perplexed, but stay with me. 😄

A turn consists of picking a movement template and a photo-angle template, then using these to move and line up a picture. However this is where a twist comes in: you cannot check to see how those templates work for you, you have to estimate with your eyes and go for it. You can then clip on the template on the base of your miniature - the game even comes with neoprene stickers for the bases so they don’t slide away or scratch your board.

You can rotate your template, but cannot move through animals or other players. After you move, you clip on your photo-angle template and line up your shot. If your movement was suboptimal, you can no longer change it. And it often will be suboptimal. 😅 Whatever your template covers are the things that will be on your photo - and even if just a tiny bit of something sticks out, you missed it.

There are 5 biomes on the circular board. Wherever your camera is pointed, is the type of panorama card you take, then place tokens on it depending on what you managed to capture. There are different set-collection or scoring rules for flowers, trees and animals, and linking up your panorama cards well nets you points too.

To shake up gameplay, a scoring card is revealed each round. 🧐 These all remain active, so on later rounds you have several conditions to take into account to score well. After 5 turns, so 5 panorama cards, the game is over and you add up your points to see who wins.

It’s a simple game to understand, but it’s not easy to do well. It’s a perfect gateway or family game, as it’s easy to get going and games are fast. And you are sure to have a laugh or few when people misjudge their templates. 😄 Oh and did I mention the game is beautiful?