Any good fairy tale needs a knight in shining armor, a strong princess and a big scary dragon. They need a castle or two nestled away in the mountains and alternating lands of forest and open plains that they can fulfill quests and interact with each other in. And they need a story. Something that flows and allows us to see their adventures and experience it alongside of them. Something that crosses their paths and plans and weaves a tapestry before our very eyes. Every good fairy tale will bring that and more. But what if we could take the best things in gaming and smash it together with a legitimate story and play it out? Enter in Fairy Tile, and you can have all the best parts of a story wrapped into a game come to life on your table.
Fairy Tile is a new game from iello games, designed by Matthew Dunstan and Brett J Gilbert with illustrations from Miguel Coimbra and graphic design by LowKey. The game plays 2-4 players at 30 minutes and is recommended for ages 8 and up.
Components:
Fairy Tile comes in a small game box, approx 8×8 square with everything you need to play read to go. The contents include:
15 Land tiles (2 sided with different sides)
1 Dragon figure
1 Knight figure
1 Princess figure
4 Player aide cards
4 Magic Tokens
36 Page cards
Gameplay:
The basic gameplay in Fairy Tile involves placing tiles and moving the Knight, Princess and Dragon around the realm, trying to fulfill your objectives on the page cards in the story you are all trying to tell. You will continue to play over repeated turns until someone has read all of their story cards, thus fulfilling their objectives and winning the game.
To begin Fairy Tile you will set the board up with the initial 3 tiles that all each house one of the three figures. Each player is dealt an equal number of page cards and makes a stack face down, drawing the top card. This will become your storybook, and your goal is to be the first person to fulfill all the objectives in that story and read it to your opponents. Each player is also given one face down magic token.
On your turn, you may take one of two actions:
1-Develop your story
2-Turn a page
To Develop Your Story, you may take one of two actions that will allow you to Go On An Adventure.. You can either move a character on the board or add a land tile. When you move a character, they each have their own set movements they can do. The Dragon must move in a straight line to an edge as far as possible. The Knight can move two spaces exactly, and cannot land adjacent to or back on the spot he started. The Princess can move one space at a time, or teleport from castle to castle spaces. To add a land tile, you take the top land tile from the stack and add it to the Kingdom, making sure it touches at least two edges of the Kingdom and continues any rivers that would line up to it.
After going on the adventure, you can chose to Recount the Adventure. This is where you see if the movements done fulfilled the objective on your card/page. If you are able to do so, you place the card face up next to your book, read it and draw a new card, which is the next page of your book.
You may also opt to Turn A Page, but only if you don’t Go on an Adventure or Recount the Adventure. To do that, you take the current page and put it face down in the stack and turn your magic token face side up. Having the token face up will allow you to go on an adventure for a second time in a row.
The game ends when the first player finishes their last page of their storybook and reads it out to all the players as the champion and storyteller.
Impressions:
Things that could be better
-Depth. I would love to see some more options for gameplay in this, perhaps some ways to make the characters move or interact in different ways or to score bonus points towards completion. The game is good, but a little more depth would make it even better.
Things we loved
-Gameplay. This game has a streamlined play style, meaning you can only pick from a few decisions each turn and the movement of the characters is limited-but that only acts as a positive, giving you specific choices that leads to a very tight flow in the game. I cannot stress enough how much I loved the choices and the mechanics in this-skipping a turn to have two the next time feels balanced, and with 4 players you can
-The art. This may be one of the more beautiful illustrated cards I have seen in a game. The components all look great but the art on the cards stands out as a true gem here. I can’t stress enough how much I love the art.
-The minis. Miniatures are all the rage in boardgames nowadays, and the more weight in plastic the more the hotness scale seems to go up. But this game gives you just enough of them-3 painted minis that all look great running around the board.
-The story. I am not normally a fan of games that lend to storytelling as part of the mechanics, but I do enjoy a good story. Up until now I hadn’t seen it done in a way that scratched that storytelling itch with just enough until now. I loved this, and the kids and I were all trying to finish first to be able to read our story.
Overall
Fairy Tile is an excellent addition to the line of games from iello. It mixes the right amount of strategy in tile laying and character movement while giving you objectives that seem easy to accomplish but in reality are much more challenging then they seem. The written story aspect adds a nice element at the end, mixing the storytelling of a fairy tale into the tile-laying mechanics of a great game. Make sure you check this out when it releases and add it to your gaming library!
