Hard hats on. Morning light slants through the canopy, a stream runs cold over the stones, and somewhere a harvester rumbles awake. Forestry, Michal Peichl’s eurogame from Czech publisher Pink Troubadour, makes one to four players modern foresters for ten rounds — and the forest has to outlast you all. You split your actions between two workers: a harvester out in the hex-mapped woods, felling pine, spruce, birch, oak and beech, and a manager moving between the sawmill buildings at the forest’s edge, turning raw logs into finished timber for lucrative contracts. But every cleared hex waits for seedlings, the rivers call for bridges and reservoirs, and caring for young trees and wildlife pays off in its own way. Harvest hard, replant faithfully, and think a long way ahead.
🎶 The Soundtrack — Songs of a Working Forest
Five long pieces, ninety minutes of zen-like forest music — about the length of a full game. Airy pads, bamboo flute and koto drift over soft organic rhythms, rain and running water, and the beats evolve slowly instead of driving: music for planning, replanting and patience.
- Mist Before the First Cut — Dawn in the forest. Airy pads hang like morning mist between the trunks while a Japanese shakuhachi breathes long, wandering phrases through the trees. Mystic and still — the hour before the crew arrives, when the forest still belongs to itself.
- Mossy Understorey — Zen forest ambience for the slow work of tending. A soft bamboo flute drifts low over the mossy woodland floor, unhurried and close, as quiet as hands pressing soil around a seedling. Calm enough to think by, which is exactly what your next round needs.
- Rain on the Seedling Beds — A quiet woodland zen groove, with rain pattering on the leaves. Soft koto phrases fall like drops through the gentle rhythm, and the whole piece has the steady patience of a nursery shed in a shower. Growth, it suggests, can’t be rushed.
- The Long Rotation — The strategist’s track. Serene canopy textures and warm wooden tones carry a calm, purposeful momentum — music for weighing a contract against a clearing, or a sawmill upgrade against a fresh row of saplings. Measured and clear-headed, like a forester’s plan drawn decades ahead.
- Where the Streams Run Deep — Deep green forest meditation to close the day. Flowing streams carry the piece, with something distant always at the edge of hearing, and the calm settles over everything like evening shade. The harvesters fall silent; the forest keeps growing.
🎨 The Art — Hard Hats and Golden Hour
The AI-generated artwork reads like a set of oil paintings from an ordinary working day in a well-kept forest. Low golden light pours through leafy canopies onto moss, ferns and clear, stony streams, and every scene is punctuated by the bright orange of hard hats and hi-vis vests. The crews do what the game asks of you: planting saplings inside pale-green tree guards, sorting seedling trays in a forest nursery, kneeling beside a young oak that rises from an old stump, surveying a stand with clipboards and measuring poles, and guiding a green forwarder as it loads freshly cut logs. Deer, songbirds and butterflies share the clearings, wide views show the forest as a patchwork of stumps, young plantings and mature stands rolling away to distant lakes, and the day ends with the crew walking home at sunset toward a lit cabin.
🎬 Watch & Listen
Pull on your boots. Fell what you must, plant more than you take, and let the soundtrack of Forestry play beneath your game — slow, green and patient, like the forest you’re growing for whoever comes after you.