This is a great idea, but the rules as written are difficult to follow and have some key rules missing. Also, the game's design is lacking interesting choices because the forest deck is always shuffled and the cards in the character track are always going to be the same relative distance from the lowest cards in the forest.
Here are some suggestions that I found gave the game some more interesting choices
- Play with 2 parallel decks: one for the forest (compiled as described in the Forest Deck section) and one for the character.
- The forest deck is not shuffled between lives (unless it's less than the minimum deck size), and forest cards turned face up remain face up in the forest deck.
- When a card is captured or defeated, place it in the forest discard pile.
- When a card is defeated, mark 1 space of progress. (Capturing already grants progress.)
- When a card is captured, add the corresponding card from the character deck to the character track.
- When the forest deck's size is less than the minimum deck size, shuffle the discard pile and the next set of values into the forest deck, turning any face up cards back to face down.
These changes add some interesting choices since you can see some of the cards being dealt, adds some deeper strategy with when to push forward and flip more cards or when to defeat higher value cards (since they will eventually get shuffled), and makes it so that higher value character cards feel more powerful because you can annihilate the lower value cards to gain incremental progress while you're searching for your seek cards.