First Impression: Fairy Tale

Last summer there was quite a buzz around a new card game from Japan named Fairy Tale. I'm coming a little late to the party because I had enough domestic games to keep me busy without resorting to importing a game from Japan. Now thanks to Z-Man Games, I don't have to import it. They've printed an English version and today I cracked open a copy so Kray (my oldest son) and I could try it out.

The rules describe a basic rule set and an advanced rule set. I'd recommend you just jump right into the advanced rule set. It's not that much harder and it makes the game a lot more interesting.

So far, I've only played the game with two players but I must say it plays pretty well. I'll play it with more players soon and after I do, I'll try and write a proper review.

The coolest thing in the game is the drafting mechanic. Each player is dealt an initial hand of five cards. Everyone simultaneously drafts one card from their initial hand into their main hand and they pass the rest to their neighbor. This is repeated five times until each player has drafted five cards. Once the final hands have been drafted, play begins for that round. This is a brilliant idea. It eliminates a lot of the luck of the deal and it also creates some shared knowledge about what cards other players might have.

The other cool part of the game is the way that the cards interact with one another to score points but I'll save a description of how that works for my review.

So the quick summary: This looks like a very cool card game which I plan to play quite a bit in the next few days.