Canopy

Canopy is a peaceful-looking rainforest card game with a surprisingly good push-your-luck draft underneath it. One to four players build personal ecosystems from trees, plants, weather, and wildlife, but the original design is especially well suited to two players. On your turn, inspect the first of three Growth piles. You can take it, or put it back and add another card before looking at the next pile. Passing might lead to exactly what your forest needs. It also makes that first pile better for whoever sees it next.

Grow a Rainforest One Risky Pile at a Time

Your forest wants a little of everything, but not everything wants to be collected the same way. Trees are assembled into trunks and canopies. Plants score according to their own patterns. Wildlife often becomes more valuable in pairs. Fire, drought, and disease are considerably less welcome.

That creates a relaxed drafting game where the decisions remain pleasantly pointed. You are building something attractive in front of you, but you are also watching which pile your opponent just rejected and trying to decide whether they improved it enough for you to take the risk.

How the Game Works

Each turn begins with three face-down Growth piles. Look at the first pile privately. If you want it, add all of those cards to your rainforest. If not, return it face down, add a new card to that pile, and inspect the next one. Reject all three and you draw from the deck instead.

Cards create different scoring opportunities in your tableau. Complete trees compete for height awards, plants reward particular sets or quantities, animals create relationships within the ecosystem, and weather or natural hazards can help or hurt depending on what you have collected.

The game runs across three seasons, so there is enough time to develop a plan but not enough time to collect everything. Solo and multiplayer variants extend the original two-player system to 1–4 players.

Why You’ll Love It

• The growing-pile draft makes passing a card meaningful instead of simply saying no.
• Different plants, trees, animals, and weather effects give your rainforest several small scoring puzzles at once.
• Vincent Dutrait's artwork makes the finished forests genuinely pleasant to look at.
• It is calm in presentation without being solitaire; your decisions directly change the choices available to the next player.

Game Details

🧩 Players: 1–4
⏱️ Playtime: About 30 minutes
🎂 Age: 8+
🗂️ Genre: Nature card game, open drafting, push-your-luck, set collection, tableau building
🎯 Complexity: Light-medium; easy to teach, with enough card interaction and scoring tradeoffs to reward repeat play
🔁 Replayability: Good, with different card combinations, advanced cards, variants, and the uncertainty created by the Growth piles
🎮 Great for fans of: Arboretum, nature-themed tableau games, set collection, Winston-style drafting, and games that feel relaxed without removing meaningful decisions

What's in the Box

• 5 Game Board Cards: 3 Standard and 2 Variants
• 140 Rainforest Cards: 112 Standard and 28 Advanced
• 21 Seed Cards
• 11 Shifting Seasons Cards
• 4 Award Tokens
• 50 Point Tokens
• 10 Wildlife Tokens
• 4 Starting Trunk Cards
• 2 Player Aid Cards
• Rules, Including Solo and 3–4 Player Variants