Note: Originally my ramblings from Discord.

Just got Orchard and Forage to complete the set with Grove (all games by Mark Tuck).

Orchard 2.0 definitely is improved from the original Orchard in the form of the fruit count progression (1, 3, 5 is now 1, 3, 6, 10), which increases rewards for stacking up fruits. As it gets harder and harder, your point increase amount goes up.

Grove made a few fascinating changes from Orchard. First, the number of fruits added will differ (in Orchard, the increment wasn’t based on how many fruits were in the overlapping tree) and thus the fruit count progression was adjusted to be more granular (2 to 6) until you breached 6, which resulted in 10 and (once per game) 15.

Second, you had glades that allowed more flexibility in matching at the cost of covering a tree for nothing or putting a fruit die on the glade which won’t be worth points (unless a future tree of the right type is placed there).

Third, the handling of match violations in Grove is much more strict (you can only do it once in Grove, versus twice in Orchard) with a potential for a little less punishment in point penalties.

Recipes were added for Orchard in a PNP expansion so that difference isn’t much of one anymore.

Then we get to Forage. And I’m glad I picked up Forage, because this is a more mature design. Mature doesn’t always mean “better” or “I like it more” or “it’s harder” or “it’s easier” – to me it means that the game mechanisms and game play flow smoothly. Less jank, perhaps?

So first, Forage removes the need to do varying amounts of addition based on added fruits (in Grove) in favor of a non-linear progression that’s more expansive than Orchard (this will be important). The number of fruits you added in Grove was always 1-3, which means you must use up more sides of the harvest dice for mundane scores rather than adding on to a geometric explosion. In Forage, geometric-like explosion is on the table from go.

Second, Forage replaces the glades of grove with 2-value wild areas, so that instead of a null square (what a glade is), you can actually alter the types of area a bit of ground is considered, which means any match with a harvest item you make to such an area will increment or place a harvest die there.

This means empty areas actually matter much more now. This seems to loosen the game up, not because your choices are reduced, but because your choices for future flexibility are increased.

Third, Forage’s die progression goes 1, 3, 6, 10, 15 as many times as you possibly can – a relief from Grove’s single little 15 fruit cart meeple – and that’s an awful lot of steps that you can’t complete without doing more match violations. And Forage finally gives the player the freedom to match violate with a lesser point penalty more often, though with the same placement penalties, as each die now allows you to put down a -2 mouse. And this was necessary because calculated match violations is how you will actually score well in Forage.

Forage is weirdly subversive in the context of the Harvest trilogy because of that third point alone, but also because it reduces the amount of punishment its sibling games like to mete out. And for some, that punishment and need for difficult to solve optimization problems is the soul of a Harvest game.

But I think Forage is about opening up more possibilities, and potentially taking the series elsewhere. There are penalties, sure, and accrue too many and you will definitely suffer; but they aren’t fatal and can be a part of your strategy.

In Orchard, we would only let fruit rot if there were absolutely no other choice; then Grove reinforced that.

Forage said, instead, “There is no leaf without the rot,” and what was once forbidden can potentially be exploited for more points.

And if that doesn’t play upon a pun about things aging in autumn, I’m not sure I’m qualified to review a Mark Tuck game.

Addendum: OH. Right. Recipes. They’re here. Recipes, good. Not the most interesting part of any of these games to me but I like them existing.