Mushroom Foray

After several days of rain, commercial pickers, hobbyists, hippies, and other back woodsy folk gather in hope for fungal treasures!

Outmaneuver your fellow misfits to forage for goodies, satisfy chef requests, and heal the earth. Grow and consume mushrooms to level up your abilities. You must hurry because increasing pollution and destruction will damage your foraging grounds.

In Mushroom Foray, 5 decks of cards representing regions are positioned randomly in a horizontal line. Below the regions, players drive their run down vehicles laterally to forage the regions and swap treasures at trading tents. On their turn, players can either stay in their region to forage for 2 cards or move 1 space in either direction to forage for 1 card. Then, players can play action cards, trade, or grow mushrooms.

There are two types of action cards: Victory Cards and Ability Cards. Victory cards are played face up in front of the player who satisfies the mushroom requirements displayed on the card. For example, “Save the Bees!” card requires 1 Reshi mushroom tincture to play the victory card. The first player who plays 8 victory cards wins the game.

Chef Requests are a type of victory card that are satisfied by gathering the mushrooms needed for recipes. Deforestation, Contamination, and Plastic Waste are special victory cards called destruction cards that are randomly drawn from the burn, forest, river, and plains regions. After these cards are drawn, they must be placed face up on their associated region deck until a player can satisfy the restoration requirements. All players lose if the burn, forest, river, and plains regions all have unresolved destruction cards for a full turn.

Ability cards grant players special skills. Each player can only play 3 ability cards, so the players will need to choose the ability and timing carefully. Each ability card can be played after discarding the required mushroom icons representing the specific regions where the mushrooms were foraged. Magic mushrooms can satisfy any mushroom icon (plains, forest, river). Magic Mushrooms can also be spent to reactivate any 1 played abilities. The player immediately performs the ability card action after playing the card face up on the table. Then, the player can choose to perform any of their previously played abilities in any order. Finally, in turn order, any opponent sharing the same space of the player who played an ability can choose to perform any 1 of that player’s abilities.

On their turn, players can also exchange cards from their hands with the trading tents. Tents are split into 2 halves with a number or symbol on each side. One half of the tent is always covered by cards. The numbers and symbols represent the required number and type of cards that can be traded for the cards presented on the other half of the tent. A player can place the required cards on one side of the tent to take the available cards.

Players will need to grow mushrooms to satisfy some of the victory cards. Each player has 4 cards arranged as a grow chamber: Prepare, Grow, Grain, and Tincture. At the start of the game, each of the grow chamber cards are greyed out. Players must satisfy the requirements to flip cards to activate each phase in the grow chamber. First, players must place a cultivatable mushroom (indicated by a mushroom icon) onto the Prepare card. Then, the player must discard the requirement cards to flip the Grow card. Now, the player will receive 1 mushroom token each turn onto the Grow card. Each mushroom token inherits the characteristics of the prepared mushroom card. Finally, the player can discard the requirements for the Grain and Tincture phases to flip their mushroom tokens into colonized grain or medicinal tinctures. Grain and tinctures are requirements for some victory cards.

The game immediately ends when a winning player has played 8 victory cards or when the burn, forest, river, and plains regions all have been damaged by destruction cards for a full turn. All players lose if the second condition is met.

-description from designer