The perfect cozy game for the autumn season

Leaf 🍁 is a very cool nature-themed tile-laying game - or rather leaf-laying game? 🍂🤔 There are many nature-themed light-weight games out there nowadays, but I think Leaf brings something fun to the table, and is a strong contender of this category. 💪 Let’s take a closer look at how it plays! 🕵️

On your turn you have to play a leaf card, take the appropriate leaf type and place it down touching other leaves already in the center of the table. ☝️ For each leaf tip you connect, you get to do actions, and the colors of these leaf tips determine the type of the actions (the leaf you place doesn’t count though). So you are trying to get as many actions as possible and combo together actions you need most, which is made somewhat difficult by the fact that leaves have different shapes and sizes! 😉

Depending on the color of the leaf touched you can:
🟢 Draw a leaf card. This is important as you will have more choices of what leaf to place, but also because if you ever start your turn with 0 cards you get a penalty. 🍁
🟠 Take an animal card from the display. This is standard set-collection with a twist: you only score animals that you send to your winter den. Frost is triggered 3 times during the game, which is when you can send cards of one animal type to the den. 🐾
🟡 Take a sun token, which are used to push the season token forward to score points, that also brings the end of the game closer. ☀️
🟤 Move your squirrel up the tree, gaining the bonuses of every space it walks through. You get bonus points if you are 1st or 2nd on the track at the end. 🐿️
🔴 Place a baby mushroom on a leaf, or grow one into an adult mushroom. These produce sun tokens if opponents place leaves next to them, and groups of adult mushrooms also score points at the game’s end. 🍄

Turns are pretty snappy, and it’s fun searching for nice leaf placement spots. At first I struggled to see how some of the leaves fit, but I quickly got better at it. 💪 I love the idea of this leaf-laying, I think it’s really unique thanks to the different shapes. It also helps that the game looks gorgeous and colorful, with some cute animals too!