Forever Home

The Game

Forever Home is a game about dog shelters. You work at a dog shelter. You train dogs and find new homes for them. This is a game dog lovers will enjoy. It is a light to mid weight family strategy game. 

This is the main game board. The four cards on top are four different locations you can send the dogs to - the city, the suburbs, the countryside and foster homes. Depending on the types of dogs you send to these locations, you will score points in different ways. The scoring methods vary from game to game depending on your setup. In this particular game, when sending dogs to the city, the more types of dogs you send, the more points you score. When sending dogs to the suburbs, you gain points for specific combinations of dog breeds. When sending dogs to the countryside, every set of three dogs of the same breed gives you 6 points. When sending dogs to foster homes, each dog gets 1 point, which is not much. 

On the game board you can see seven dog breeds. There is a scoring system based on dog breeds, where you will be compared against the other players. The players with the most red and purple dogs remaining on their player boards at the end of the game score 3 points and 1 point respectively. The players who have sent the most orange, blue and pink dogs to homes score 3 / 2 / 1 points. The players who have sent yellow and green dogs to the most different locations score 3 / 1 points. 

At the centre of the table there will always be four dogs and four cards you can pick from. Of the three things you may do on your turn, two of them are taking a dog and taking a card. Very straight-forward. When you take a dog, you place it on your player board. Dogs on your player board are used for completing missions shown on your cards. The third thing you may do on your turn is to train the dogs on your player board. This means moving a dog one step. This can be either orthogonally or diagonally. The missions specified on the cards require a specific number of dog breeds and a specific configuration. Whenever you complete a mission, you play the card and you'll get to send some dogs to new homes. The missions have point values. The game ends when a player completes the 7th mission. You total your points to see who wins. 

The player board is a 5x5 grid on which you place dogs. 

After they are placed, dogs may move around the grid, one dog and one step at a time. 

When you complete a mission and get to send dogs to new homes, you move the dogs to one of the four sections along the top of your player board. They represent city, suburb, countryside and foster home. At this point I had three dogs sent to the suburbs, and one dog each sent to the city, the countryside and the foster home. I sent yellow dogs to many different places because that was how they scored. 

The purple and blue dogs on my player board are completing this mission on the right. This particular mission doesn't score points (the 0 in the heart icon at the bottom right), but it allows me to send three dogs to new homes (the 3 inside the house icon at the top left). These three dogs must be from among those which completed the mission. 

The Play

Forever Home has a clear and attractive theme, but it is actually a pretty abstract game. There are three ways to score points. You collect dogs and missions, and you position the dogs to fulfil the missions. Of the three ways to score points, one is based on dogs, another is based on the new homes, and the last is based on the missions. You can't do everything and you will have to choose, and the best thing to choose is whatever lets you accomplish multiple things at once. Let's say yellow dogs score points for being sent out to many different locations. You use them to fulfil missions. You also use them to fulfil some location specific scoring criteria. That's an effective use of one action of claiming and placing a yellow dog. You want to kill three birds with one stone whenever you can. Naturally that's easier said than done. Most of the time you have to make difficult decisions. You need to decide what to pursue and what to let go of. 

You can think of this as a game of efficiency. In addition to wanting to accomplish many things with the same action, you also want to fulfil missions with the fewest steps. Ideally you don't spend turns to move dogs about. You want to place them at the right spots to fulfil the missions. Once they get adopted at new homes, they make space for new dogs, and those new dogs are also placed to precisely fulfil the next mission. In an ideal world, you will be playing like this. The challenge lies in what kind of dogs and missions turn up. You can only work within these, and try to be as efficient as possible. 

You need to watch your opponents. If they are leading by a large margin in certain areas, you probably don't want to waste any more energy competing in those areas. Instead you want to fight where you can still earn points. 

The game ends once anyone fulfils their seventh mission. There is time pressure. You want to score as many points as possible within this limited time. I think one good principle to follow is to maintain a certain points average per mission. Don't measure this directly based on the mission value, but divide your game into seven time periods based on when you complete a mission. You should aim for a certain point value per segment. Assuming everyone will more or less complete seven missions, if your average score per mission segment is high, you will win. Well, I've only played the game once, so this is just my theory and it needs to be tested more. I think it is also possible to play the speed-over-quality game. Catch your opponents unprepared. However I think this is harder to do. 

The Thoughts

Forever Home is a straight-forward family strategy game. Every turn you are either taking a dog, taking a mission, or moving a dog. Just like Ticket to Ride, only 3 options. There is little direct aggression, but there is still meaningful competition. You are grabbing dogs and missions from the same pool. You will compete over each dog breed. I find the link to the theme tenuous. The three different categories of scoring will give you a decent brain workout.