WaldMeister (2022)

Overview

In WaldMeister, you want to shape the forest to suit your own ends.

Each player starts the game with 27 pegs, with the pegs coming in three heights and three colors, and with three pegs of each combination, e.g., short and yellow-green.

Players take turns moving and placing pegs on the game board, with one player trying to create clusters according to height while the other wants clusters according to color.

To begin, the first player places one of their pegs in a hole on the game board. On each subsequent turn, the active player chooses any peg on the game board, moves it in a straight line as far as they wish to a new empty hole (not jumping any pegs), then places a peg from their reserve in the hole just vacated.

Once all the pegs have been placed, each player counts the number of pegs in each type of cluster they score, whether short/medium/tall or yellow-green/leaf-green/dark green. The player with the higher sum wins. (The rules suggest playing two games, with players swapping goals since recognizing "height clusters" is more difficult.)