Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
“It didn’t look like much when you first started the teach, but I gotta say, that was pretty good!”
I had just finished my second play of Builders of Sylvan Dale (2025, Ares Games), but it was the first game for two of the guys in my review crew. Even while I was teaching, I could see the eyebrows cocked at the height that suggested “I think this game is gonna be garbage.”
In part, that’s because Builders of Sylvan Dale—a self-described “Game of Woodland Architecture for 2-4 Creatures” that asks players to build 3-D tree dwellings—looks a heck of a lot like Everdell, the now-classic card tableau builder featuring woodland creatures, a 3-D tree, and anthropomorphic images of creatures such as mice, enjoying their leisure time building a treehouse.
Those comparisons will happen with every playgroup featuring hobbyists who have been playing games the last few years. Here’s the big difference: Builders of Sylvan Dale is an area control game with a little bit of bite, surprising for a game that features cards displaying cute parakeets holding bundles of logs. (However, this is not a surprise given the publisher, Ares, has given us a number of fantastic wargames, such as the Quartermaster General series.)
Despite the bite, Builders of Sylvan Dale is a family-weight experience…right down to where my eight-year-old beat me in a tiebreaker during our very first game.
Bury the Hatchet
Builders of Sylvan Dale is a 2-4 player area control game that plays in about 20 minutes per player. Designed by Peter Ridgeway (Wildstyle, Katmai: The Bears of Brown River), Builders of Sylvan Dale uses a board with 3-5 distinct districts, with 3-5 trees in each of those districts. To begin play, each player has a stack of 16 tree tiles, showing one of four different dwelling types (these are unnamed, so we’ll go with roof/building descriptions instead: flat, eyeball, pointy, and mushroom). The tree tile stack for each player is shuffled and then broken into two halves, so each player can play exactly one tile from the top of the active stack on their turn.
Turns are snappy. Players choose one of their four hand cards to play to the table. Cards feature a building type and a special token icon. Players take the top-most dwelling tile in their color (regardless of whether or not its style matches the played card) and place that on top of any tree on the board where that tree’s top-most tile matches the played card’s dwelling style. If the newly placed tile is the third of its kind in that tree, a player scores a five-point bonus by placing a banner in that tree. (Trees are limited to a height of five player dwelling tiles per tree before they have “grown” to their maximum height.)
The active player can then turn in three matching bonus token icon cards from their tableau to the discard pile, to take an item that can either be used on that turn or saved for a future action. Items include treetops (which can permanently close a tree from being built on in future turns), axes, hammers, and bridges. Each can change the landscape of play, boost scoring opportunities, and augment (or possibly ruin) the dreams of opposing woodland creatures.
Then the active player takes a new card from the market, and play passes to the next player. There are two mid-round scorings, after turn eight and then turn 16, scoring points for whoever has the majority in each tree (ties going to whoever built higher in that tree), and whoever has control of the most trees in each district.
The tiebreaker, which happened in that game with my eight-year-old, goes to whoever has majority control in the most trees. (I love when high-scoring games end in ties, although it seems like I usually lose games that end in tiebreakers.)
“It’s a Game, Not a Toy”
When I saw Builders of Sylvan Dale at SPIEL 2024, walking by the demo tables at the show made me think it was more of a toy than a game. As a physical production, it looks pretty dope by the end of play.
Even by the mid-game, Builders of Sylvan Dale looks pretty cool on the table. A few of the trees get built up to their fifth and final tier (and they are six levels high, thanks to a tree base token supporting each tree); adding a treetop gives the board a handsome mix of tree height diversity. That also gives the 3-D nature of the game such depth.
But I’m a much bigger fan of the ratio here between quick turns and interesting decisions.
You’ll want to play Builders of Sylvan Dale on a small table, or one that is at eye-level if possible. That’s because you’ll need to be able to see all your options on each turn to really explore the best placement for your tiles. I was surprised how often I missed this. A player can’t always see smaller trees or those that haven’t been built on yet, players may only consider the trees closest to their seat (or ones they can see) on each turn. In an area control game, this can be a crucial mistake.
In an ideal world, I would play this on a bar-height counter that also had a lazy Susan underneath so that I could turn the board on my turns. That way, I could consider taking actions on every tree, because the mid-game scorings greatly reward a player who has control of the most trees. In a five-tree district/region, that equates to a 10-point bonus, and a couple of those helped swing the game in my favor during my first three-player game.
So, this is both a feature and a bug. In one of my games, I didn’t even sit down at the table, choosing to constantly move around to see all the trees from every vantage point on each turn. That made my turns take a little longer, but it helped me see some of the nooks and crannies that might score me more victory points. If a player chooses to sit and not move around the table, I think it will be hard to see all the possibilities available on each turn.
One other major knock—it can be really hard sometimes to tell which tiles are available to build on during a turn. It wouldn’t have looked right, but using different colors for the roofs instead of the subtle differences between the flat, pointy, and mushroom dwelling types would have been better. (No one blows it with the eyeball dwellings. It’s an eyeball, man!)
It became clear even by the middle of my first game that hand diversity is absolutely the most important strategic element of the design. When players were short on variety—each player can hold four cards, so your best move is to have one of each dwelling type in your hand each turn—they struggled through their turns.
The great thing there is that even an eight-year-old can see that. This gives Builders of Sylvan Dale a nice boost: it can be taught to anyone, and it offers many chances for clever play in a very reasonable time window.
If You Build It, Dale Will Come
Builders of Sylvan Dale is a fun ride, helped by exceptional production and a tidy storage solution included in the box. It can be taught to—and won by!—players of all types, and it has a nice amount of depth. The double-sided board scales perfectly to the player count, so there are fewer trees with two players and many chances to snipe opponents in the four-player version of the game.
The “take that” elements are not too painful. Once, maybe twice, a game, somebody loses a tile thanks to an axe bonus action. That’s really it. But the race to control a tree has limits, and I like that there is a five-level limit to each tree. Beyond that, I didn’t have too many negatives, although I wish the game was just a hair shorter (it’s really tough to get a four-player game done in less than an hour, for example).
Ares Games continues to impress with accessible, well-produced experiences that play relatively fast. Builders of Sylvan Dale is a fun, family-weight experience that scaled up nicely with hobbyists in my playgroups.
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