review

Fabulous Fable Game!

Fabelsaft

fabulously fantastic?

Sylvan fruits for fabulous juices in a Fable game! Fable Game? As stated by designer Friedemann Friese, a Fable Game is a game with rules and actions that chance during the - albeit not permanently; in principle, a kind of legacy game that can be reset to the beginning again.

In Fabelsaft / Fabled Fruit we find ourselves in a very beautiful forest full of marvelous fruit which can be pressed and mixed into wonderful juices. We are animals on the search for the tastiest of those Fabled Juices and receive help from inmates of the forest, who give us fruits or exchange fruits with us or render help in other ways.

The game features 240 location cards, 60 fruit cards, 10 fruit mix cards, six animal playing pieces and the corresponding animal tokens, five fruit tokens, three joker tokens, three double turn tokens and one playing piece Thief.

The location cards, or locations, are heart and engine of the game; there are four location cards each for numbers 1 to 58 and eight cards with # 59. The name of the location is a reminder for the action of the location; the action text of the card gives the action in detail. The card also features a sign symbol and the price for buying the card for a Fabled Juice, represented by icons for various fruits. The fruit cards, or fruits, comprise twelve each of pineapple, banana, strawberry, coconut and grapes.

The set-up of the game begins with the location cards - the huge stack is NOT shuffled, but is set down as a complete, open-faced stack, with location #1 on top and location #59 at the bottom. Locations #1 to #6 are then laid out next to the stack in six individual stacks. Fruits are shuffled and each player is dealt two fruits; the rest is stacked face-down. You select an animal piece and the corresponding animal token, all other components are set aside, because they are not needed at the start, they are introduced with later locations.

The central core mechanism is simple and identical for each turn of every player: You move your animal piece to another location and use the action of this location to collect fruits, or you forfeit the action and buy the location for a Fabled Juice and discard the necessary fruits to pay for it. Whoever has most Fabled Juices at the end, wins.

Now for the details of this mechanism:

If the location to which you move is already occupied by other animals, you must give one fruit from your hand to each animal owner; if you do not have enough, you select the recipients. If you have no fruits in hand, you can move to any location all the same, even if there are other animals there.

The action of each location is stated explicitly on the card, the general rules for them are: If you must give away a fruit, you choose it; “fellow player” or another player always excludes you, you cannot choose yourself; if only “player” is mentioned, you are included. When a location shows a sign, you must meet the condition to implement the action; if you cannot do so, you only draw one fruit at that location. There is no limit for cards in your hand.

Actions of the first six locations:

#1 – Draw two fruits from stack to your hand

#2 – Give a banana to another player, he gives you two fruits

#3 – Draw a card from stack and then swap three cards from your hand with another player

#4 – Display all fruits in hand openly; all other players can take on and you yourself draw two fruits from stack for each fruit that was taken

#5 –You discard any number of fruits and fill your hand to three fruit cards.

#6 – Reveal fruit cards from stack, one by one, and stop at any time and take all revealed fruits in hand, or discard all if a fruit appears for the second time

Fruits that you must pay for buying a location for a Fabled Juice, are discarded, for a smoothie symbol you can use any type of fruit.

If you buy a Fabled Juice, you draw the top location from the big stack - if it is the first card of the next number, you begin a new stack with it. Each newly introduced location is checked for components from stock that might be needed for that location and the respective components are set out. When the last card of a location is bought, the location action is no longer available; eventual animals on the stack go to their owners and move to a new location in their next turn.

If someone has five, four or three Fabled Juices in case of two, three or four players, you win at the end of the round with most juices.

All Fabled Juices that were bought go back into the box - SEPARATED from the location cards stack. The 24 locations still displayed on the separate stacks, are - sorted by locations and stacked in the correct order on the location card stack - and displayed again for the next game. And yes, there are definitely and always 24 locations at the start of a new game and in play, as you begin the first game with four cards each in six stacks and replace a card in those stacks that is bought for a Fabled Juice with a card drawn from the stack, so that there are always 24 cards in the display.

If you want to play several games in a row, you can award points for each game, two points for the winner, none for the last place and one point for all others in the game and the winner is the player with most points at the end of the game.

And that’s it? Yes, that’s it!

And if you now say, that’s only collecting cards and exchange them for other cards, you are basically correct, but fun and allure of the game are hiding in the details, especially in the actions of newly introduced locations with those actions getting more and more complex - for instance, location #8 introduces a market, or, using location #12, you can protect fruits from your hand with your animal token and those fruits do not count towards card in hand; some locations involve the Thief; location #24 introduces the fruit tokens as permanent fruit in hand; if you own, for instance, the pineapple token, you need not discard a pineapple to pay one pineapple. On location #32 to hand on fruits to your left neighbor, location #34 provides a double turn and location #39 provides a Joker. For location #46 you swap the location with another player and use the action of the new location. There are special rules for location #59; if it is in play before the game end is triggered, you must own it as a Fabled Juice to win the game.

For me, the game gets even more interesting because I need to cope with new rules rather quickly, because as soon as a stack of locations has been bought up, the action/rule for the location disappears, too, and I might have to change my tactics for collecting. And the challenge is, that it somehow depends on players which location and which rule disappears, because you go to locations to collect cards and thus determine what you will buy. The design of the cards if beautiful and funny, the tactic approaches slowly and provides in-game depth later in the game and thus a game with friends, which, however, can be absolutely recommended to families with a bit of gaming experience. This is set collecting with a twist and the option to re-set the game back to the beginning at any time. Due to the gradually more complex rules, a new player can enter the game at any point without a great amount of explanations, as the number or currently applicable rules is limited. Fabulously fantastic!

Dagmar de Cassan

Players: 2-5

Age: 8+

Time: 30+

Designer: Friedemann Friese

Artist: Harald Lieske

Price: ca. 30 Euro

Publisher: 2F-Spiele 2016

Web: www.2f-spiele.de

Genre: Set collecting, variable rules

Users: With friends

Version: de

Rules: bg cn cz de en es fr it jp nl pl sk

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Spiele Hit mit Freunden 2017

Enchanting illustrations

Simple basic rules

Can be reset to start anytime

Very good rulebook with a card glossary

Compares to:

Legacy for changes in the game

Dominion for using of given card stacks

All set collecting games

Other editions:

999 Games (nl), Albi (cz, sk), Arclight (jp), Edge Entertainment (es fr), Game On Publishing (bg), Giochi Uniti (it), Lacerta (pl), Stronghold Games (en), Swan Panasia (cn)

My rating: 6

Dagmar de Cassan:

Fabulous fun with rules that game and go during the game and therefore demand flexible switching of tactics and goals

Chance (pink): 0

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 2

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0