Wispwood is a tile-laying, pattern-building puzzle game.

You shape your glowing forest full of magical spirits.

Wispwood Overview

On your turn, you select one wisp tile from the central pond and choose one of the two shapes next to it. You add this wisp and tree tiles to your Forest.

In the first round, you’re gris is restricted to a 4×4 area, then a 5×5, and finally a 6×6 in round 3.

If you find nothing in the pond that fits your needs, you can take a tree turn instead. Here, you add plain old trees, usually to fill gaps. This will refresh your cat token, which you can use to refill the pond before choosing a wisp or choose any shape after selecting your wisp.

Between rounds, you can reposition your cat and all tree tiles except the one under your cat go back to the supply. But wisps you’ve already placed remain in your forest and continue to influence future placement options.

How Do You Win?

At the end of each round, you total your points from the five shared goal cards and other scoring conditions.

After three rounds, the highest total wins.

Main Mechanisms

Tile drafting, shape placement, pattern building, evolving grid coverage, and shared scoring objectives.

Theme

The Bright and magical wisps give Wispwood a spooky feel.

Setup

Shuffle the wisp tiles into the pond, set out goal cards, give players their grid aids and cat tokens, then begin drafting and placing.

Components & Artwork

The colourful wisp and tree tiles and the double-sided cat token are cute. The game is visually appealing, especially as your Forest builds out.

Ease of Teaching

Easy to teach. Simply pick a wisp, choose a shape and place it. But the puzzle comes from anticipating how the grid will evolve over three scored rounds.

Similar Games

Games like A Place for All My Books share the idea of evolving tile placement and an action selection system.

But any tile placement game where you score like Harmonies or Cascadia will do.

Wispwood Review

Positives

The puzzle of fitting diverse shapes into a growing grid is genuinely fun.

There is plenty of variability in the shared goal cards.

Cute, spooky art and theme make it feel atmospheric without being gimmicky.

Negatives

If you can’t get the shapes or tiles you want from the pond, your plan can stall.

Resetting between rounds, repositioning the cat and clearing most trees can feel fiddly.

As forests grow, earlier placement mistakes become harder to correct.

Summary

Wispwood is a clever puzzle with lots of variety and tension as your forest grows round to round.