Kantara: Spirits of the Forest 2026

In Kantara: Spirits of the Forest, players manage rival villages competing to harvest essential resources—leaves, wood, water, and meat—from a shared central forest grid. As players gather resources to expand and prosper their villages, taking too much too quickly awakens the ancient Spirit of the Forest. Players must balance safe harvesting from outer forest piles with riskier moves, such as gathering hidden resources from the deep forest or abusing the black market, which generates accumulating Bad Karma.

On a turn, a player performs one main action—harvesting up to two face-up outer cards from the same row or column, drawing hidden deep forest cards, making high-yield black market deals, or returning resources to the forest to cleanse Bad Karma. Players can also perform free actions, including trading with opponents or completing village cards when resource requirements are met. Completing villages provides permanent resource production and clears karma, but oversupplying resources inflicts penalty karma.

When the karma pool runs out, Phase 2 triggers: the Spirit awakens, a Spirit Curse modifies the grid, and a countdown begins. Once the game ends, an elimination round takes place—the player holding the most Bad Karma and the player with the fewest completed villages are both eliminated. Among the remaining non-eliminated players, victory goes to the player who scores the highest total points from completed villages and bonus resource points minus remaining Bad Karma.

—description from the publisher