by Harblnger

This review was originally published as a post on the blog "Everything that sucks! And some things that don't." on December 17, 2024. Check out the blog for the full, unedited post with all of the profanity and weird meta-references intact.



Fairy Ring is the second game (co-)designed by Laurence Grenier after the 2018-release Escape Quest: Au delà du Virtuel, which is an adventure-game-book that was only released in French, Spanish and Polish, and for this game, he teamed up with Fabien Tanguy, who also designed Cubosaurs, which kind of sucks a bit. That doesn't have any bearing on today's game, but I just thought I'd throw that out there.
In Fairy Ring, two to four players draft themselves villages made up of mushroom-towers and then (or rather simultaneously) move their own fairy around in order to gain the most mana over the course of the game. It's a drafting-game. There's two drafting-rounds and each round, everybody drafts six cards. And while there is simultaneous drafting, the game interestingly enough isn't played fully simultaneous. Because one person is always the starting player and while everybody chooses a card to draft simultaneously, once that's done, the starting player begins with their "do something with the card you drafted"-turn. That something being a) put the drafted card into your tableau, b) move your fairy as many cards clockwise as the number on the newly drafted card says and c) make the person on whose card you landed on get some mana-points and maybe also get some mana-points in the process. Sounds easy? Well... it's not not.

See, putting a newly drafted card into your tableau already isn't that straightforward. You can add the card to the left end of your tableau or you can add it to the right end. Or, if you already have a card of the same type, you can place that one on top, combining these two cards to a bigger, more useful tower. These towers can be made up of up to four cards of the same type.
So once that's done, you move your fairy. And your fairy moves clockwise as many cards as the number on the newly drafted card tells you to, and during the first rounds, these numbers range from three to five, while during the second round, they are - I believe - five through seven. You move from card to card and once you leave the leftmost card of your tableau, you enter the rightmost card of the tableau of the person sitting to your left. So all tableaus combined are kind of sort of a big rondel. And you have to move the full number of cards, you can't stop before you've done so, even if that's negative for you.
Because as said, part three is gather mana (or make someone else gather mana). Every card has a specific rule which governs how much mana the person owning the card gets when any fairy ends their movement on it. For example there's one where the person gets as much mana as the fairy moved spaces to reach it. Or one where the person gets as much mana as they have mushrooms in their village (every stack of cards is one mushroom). And so on. Here's the deal: if you land on a card in my tableau, I get the points. BUT if you have a (stack of) card(s) of the same type in your tableau, you can also activate that. So for example if you land on a "get as much mana as the number of spaces the fairy moved"-mushroom in my tableau and you reached it with a six, I get six points. But if you also have a stack of three of these cards in your tableau, you can simultaneously activate that stack and get three times six equals eighteen points. If you have multiple stacks, you need to choose one.

Each mana is basically a victory point, but for some reason, the game calls something different "victory points". Namely a number on a dial that you have and whenever you have 20 mana, you return those and advance your dial by one. At the end of the game, you reveal your dials and the person with the highest score wins. If there's a tie, the person with the most mana wins. So yeah, mana is victory points. What they call "victory points" is just multiples of twenty of the victory points you collected.
There's also a variant where there are objective cards, like "have seven mushrooms", "have three mushrooms of the same type" or "have two mushrooms of height four" and when you complete one of those, you get to place one of your "objective completed"-flower-markers and then you get a point. Which is actually twenty points. But that's not important right now.

I won our four-player-game of this. In the end, I had ten victory points, plus some leftover mana, while A. had nine, D. eight and J. six. I mostly won by building as wide a village as possible early on, consisting of different mushroom-types, to a) keep my opponents from easily skipping over my village altogether, and b) always have at least one mushroom available to activate whenever I landed on an opponent's mushroom, so that I didn't come away empty-handed. As mentioned, it apparently worked out quite well.



Fairy Ring is... interesting. Which might sound a bit damning, but my first gut-reaction after A. was finished teaching the game was "This sounds fthagning horrible", so it could have been way, way worse, eh? Yeah, it could have. Especially since the "interesting"-remark isn't meant all that negatively. I had fun with the game. I do have some potential qualms about it, but... We'll get to that, right?

So what is it that made me go "This sounds futarking horrible" at first? Well, the whole idea of "draft a card to place in your tableau, then move your fairy as many spaces as the card said, then maybe get victory-points or maybe rather give ones to someone else" sounded absolutely uncontrollable, especially with four players at the table and especially especially if you are the last player doing your thing. Because as said, these things don't happen simultaneously. Everybody drafts, then the first player adds the card to their tableau and then moves and then activates. So they know exactly what they'll get, but for everybody else, especially early on, the whole thing is an utter crapshoot, because when there's up to three other people who could play their new card to the left, to the right or on top of another one in their tableau, there's no way of knowing what'll happen with your movement. Luckily, as the tableaus grow, things get more predictable and it's often just one, maybe two people who might affect your movement and you can usually narrow it down to one or two cards on which you'll land. Or maybe you can do what I did late in the game and look the opponent who's currently taking their turn deep in the eyes and go "Listen, I have no choice, I'll move exactly this many spaces, so if you don't put your new card on this end of your tableau, I'll land on that card that won't get you anything". I have no idea whether that's allowed or not, it's not specifically forbidden, but then again, very few games forbid that you get up, stand on the table and widdle all over the components, but you still wouldn't do it, would you? But yeah, it worked and A. got seven points out of the deal. I hadn't told her that I would get 21, but... I mean, she could have asked and she didn't. So it's not my fault.

But yeah, the longer the game lasts, the more controllable it becomes. I mean... it doesn't last super-long to begin with. As said, you draft twelve cards over the course of the game, which happens simultaneously, and then when you reveal, you do have some decisions (where do I put my new card and also some of the cards have multiple movement-numbers and you can choose one of them, instead of forcing you to move a certain amount), but these aren't that time-consuming. The box says 40 minutes and while our game lasted longer (a bit over an hour, I think, but that included teaching and while it's not a complex game, the teaching does take a moment, because the whole thing isn't that intuitive), I'd say that's about right. And for a game of that length, it's quite engaging. There isn't a lot of downtime, there's always something you can do and when you manage to make a really clever move that nets you a lot of points (getting 20+ mana with a single move isn't that uncommon late in the game) or when someone else triggers one of your mushrooms, that's very satisfying.

So what's the problem? Well, no real problem. I think. But as said, I have some qualms. First of all, while it was fun, it wasn't super-mega-extra-fun with cheese and jalapenos on top. It was fun, it was good, it was decent, but it didn't completely wow me. Maybe it's because it's not necessarily my style of game (despite having grown to like quite a few of them, I'm still not a huge drafting-guy), maybe it's because while I was never bored, there's really not that much going on in the game. You draft twelve cards. Each card does two things simultaneously. But yeah, you don't really do much. And while there's a decent sense of progression (as said, high payouts of 20+ mana aren't that uncommon by the end), it doesn't really feel like you're building an engine or something like that, but rather like you're taking a bit of stuff in the game and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. It's a bit slippery and probably even more so than in other games, someone who... I don't know how to say... "isn't playing that well" can really throw off the balance of the game. I think I played decently well, but I got a lot of points from J., who seemed to make the worst moves whenever he found himself in the vicinity of my village and pushed me quite a bit. I wouldn't necessarily call that "kingmaking", but... maybe it is? Even if it was accidental?
On the other hand... and yes, I know, I've played this once, I probably shouldn't say anything in regards to strategy and balance and poop, but I have the feeling that building a big, sprawling city of smaller mushrooms and then only building up one or two that you intend to trigger more often is probably far superior to building some really high-scoring mushrooms, because if you build vertically instead of horizontally, you don't have that many different mushrooms and therefore run the risk of landing on the mushrooms of opponents that don't give you anything more often, and it's also easier for your opponents to completely skip your village. And yeah, it's cool that you get 24 points if you land on a mushroom of that type. But it's probably better for me to get seven to ten when I land on a mushroom of ANY type and then also get a dungload of points from people who just can't pass my village.
I could be wrong. I don't think I am, but I could be. And it's also a question of how important this is for the game itself, because this being a decently light drafting-game, the fun probably comes not necessarily from "having the superior strategy", but from leveraging the cards you get to the best of your abilities. So... Maybe that's enough. As said, I don't know, I've played it once, but we all know that it's more than okay to review a game after a single play.

So there you have it, that's Fairy Ring. Not spectacular, but interesting and different and maybe that's enough for a couple of plays every now and again. I've definitely played worse.

This review was originally published on the "Everything that sucks! And some things that don't."-blog. Check it out for the original review, lots of additional content, as well as daily AI-generated pictures of Teddy Bears. For some reason. And if you're just here for the reviews, check out this GeekList for all of my reviews thus far!

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