Fae – Board Game Review

Back in 2002, Z-Man games released a title called Clans, a quick 30 minute experience that had players moving pawns around a fantasy map to score points. For what ever reason – perhaps Clans was very popular? – Z-Man decided to relaunch the game under a new coat of paint, and in 2018 released the refreshed version of Clans called Fae. Fae is designed by Leo Colovini, and is a 2-4 player, 30 minute experience that, like Clans, has players moving druids around a map in order to score points. Let’s dive in and take a look!

 Setup

Once all the components are removed from the box, players will set the large  board in the middle of the table, and randomly place the 60 plastic druid figures on the board, one per space. On one side of the board, 5 separate piles of cards – numbered 1-5 – will be laid out, and these will aid in scoring. Once this is one, each player will be dealt a character card which will denote the ma specific colour, and the game begins. Your colour – and the colour of those you are playing with – remains secret during the entire game. It is up to you to make groupings that will benefit you the most.

 How to Play

On a players turn, they will pick one druid – or groupings of druids if they happen to reside on the same region type – and move them to an adjacent region that is occupied by at least one druid. Players are not required to move their own druids, and can only move druids from one space to another that contains druids. Druids CANNOT move to open spaces on the game board. A group of 7 or more druids cannot move, but can be added to.

Taking into account that druids can move over rivers but not over lakes, players will continue to move druids around the board until a group of druids is isolated. An isolated group means the druids cannot be moved to a new location because they are surrounded by empty regions, and as we learned above, druids must move into regions with other druids. When a group becomes isolated, scoring immediately begins.

Referencing the scoring cards laid out from 1-5 on the side of the board, the player who created the isolated group will draw the top card of the leftmost deck. Cards valued 1-4 will have two images, a favourable region and an unfavourable region. If you are scoring a region that is favourable – the top, coloured half of the cards depicts which region is favourable in this scoring round – all scoring players within the region will gain 1 extra bonus point. If an unfavourable region is scored, all druids are returned to the box and no points are awarded. Who ever initiated the scoring will take the scoring card from the pile and place it in front of them. It is worth 1 additional point at the end of the game.

Scoring happens as follows:

• If not all 5 colours are represented in the region, each colour scores points depending on the number of druids within the space. For example, if there are 3 red druids, 2 blue druids, and 1 purple druid in a space, all three players would score 6 points. The number of your own druids is not important except…
• When all druids are present in a scoring space, all single druids are removed and then the region is scores. For example, if there are 2 red, 2 blue, 2 yellow, 1 purple, and 1 grey in a region, the purple and yellow druids are removed, and the other 3 colours score 6 points each, plus any bonuses.

 Is It Good?

What I really enjoyed about playing Fae is that the concept is fairly simple. With 4 players, we set the game up, read the rules, and played within 40 minutes, which for first time players seems pretty solid as the game suggest roughly 3o minutes. The rules are beautifully detailed and easy to read, and with so few things to remember, it wasn’t hard to get going. All of that being said, while the game is easy to understand, it’s incredibly difficult to do well.

As you are doing your best to hide from others what colour druids you are attempting to score, you often will weight the benefits of scoring yourself favourably while taking into account how far into the game you are. In my own experience, we were only a few turns into the game when I could have grouped up 3 red druids and 3 blue druids, and move my one grey druid into the region to score. That would have netted me – along with red and blue – 7 points each, but they would have lost 3 druids from the game and I would have only lost one. Understandably, however, that would have allowed others to quickly deduce which colour I was playing as, so I instead opted for a move that only scored me 5 points.

At some point – a bit over half way for myself – you will quickly figure out who is playing what colour, so the further along you get into the game, the less worried you become about hiding your identity, and you instead focus your moves on scoring yourself as best as possible.

But the game works really well, and everyone who played the half dozen or so games played over this past weekend thoroughly enjoyed their time and wanted to play again in the future. There were a few things, however, that did not go over so well.

1. Regions – the regions are divided up by colour and odd shape, but it still makes it difficult to differentiate one region from another. Black borders around each region wouldn’t have done much for the aesthetics of the game, but would have increased playability quite a bit. As it stands now, the board looks beautiful, albeit messy for game play purposes.
2. The 12 bonus cards that you use throughout the game always have a favourable scoring location and an unfavourable location. The exception is the last card in the game, which scores all regions as favourable. Each pile of cards is the same, so all 1 point bonus cards will scores hills favourable, but mushrooms unfavourably. Had these cards been mixed up a bit more, scoring and playing would have been a tad more strategic.

It’s hard not to recommend Fae. Even with the questionable design choices, there is still a lot of fun to be had here.