Fairy Ring: My Favorite Mechanism

Hey, I'm Jamie from Stillmmy Games and today I'm going to talk about my favorite mechanism in the game Fairy Ring, which I played at four players for the first time just the other day. Fairy Ring looks like this. So, this is a game about growing mushroom towers where little fairies live. And um that's the theme of the game.

The core mechanism of the game is that you are drafting cards and playing those cards to form mushroom towers. Um, this photo does a pretty good job of summing up everything that fairy ring is all about. So, you have these, this is kind of a photo from the end of the game of fairy ring where you've built up these towers and you are placing the cards on top of one another as you can see down here to form taller and taller towers.

Each type of mushroom has a different type of scoring. Um, and where this game shines is the decision of, I guess I would say the decision of which card to play because this influences so much that happens in the game. When you choose a card to play, you don't actually gain anything from that card right away.

You are just adding it to your tableau. And you're choosing two things. You're choosing either which if I already have that mushroom type, do I put it on top of that mushroom to make it taller? uh or do I put it do I create kind of a new start to a mushroom tower? And if I do choose that, do I place it on the left or do I place it on the right?

And the reason that matters is because the other information on that card, it's a little hard to see here, but in the upper lefthand corner, there's a number typically between three and seven, that indicates how many spaces clockwise around the table you are going to move your fairy. And so if I'm the red player and I have a I play a card that says move five spaces, I'm going to pick up my red fairy token from over here.

I I'm this player over here. Pick up this fairy token. I'm going to move it one, two, three, four, five spaces and it's going to land on this green uh mushroom tower over here. And what that does is that first, well, I guess I don't know if the order truly matters, but simultaneously essentially the player whose mushroom tower you landed on will score for that tower if it is a scoring ability that triggers when uh the fairy lands on it, which happens almost always.

And if I have any matching types of that uh of that mushroom, so if I have any green, it looks like I have one green mushroom over here, I will trigger that benefit as well. And so, uh, and this is why I'm mentioning all this all at once because the places where you put the the mushrooms impact, uh, impact how often you're going to trigger your own tableau as or that other players will trigger your tableau as these fairies move across it.

So, you can go wide and you can have a really wide display of mushrooms and uh, and that will mean that more fairies land on them more often, including your own. Um, and it also means probably that you have more different types of fairies. So, when you land on someone else's mushroom, I'm sorry, fairies mushroom types.

When you move on to someone else's mushroom type, the greater the odds that you have that mushroom type and you get to trigger it as well. Or you can go narrow and kind of focus on a few specific mushrooms, which means that you're going to have your mushrooms landed on less often, but they might score a lot more points when you do land on that type of mushroom or when someone else lands on that type of mushroom.

Uh, so there's some really great choices around which card you're going to play and where you're going to place it because it impacts all these different decisions. I don't think I've ever seen a drafting game where you are moving a piece around the table in this way where your decisions of the fairy that you're moving and the card that you're playing have so many so much of of an impact on the other players as well.

Um, and that made me really like fairy ring quite a bit. I also wanted to mention two uh product design decisions that I thought were really clever. one was you can see this player mat. Let's see if I can zoom in a little bit here on this player mat. Oh, we're going to get real big. This player mat is very simple.

Yeah, I think we're too big. It's very simple, but it I think it's a a really nice addition to a drafting game because what it what it says is the card that you place here is the card that you were going to play and then the cards that you're placing here are the cards that you are not playing. Uh so in a drafting game, you're given a hand of cards, you're choosing one, you're passing the rest.

Uh, so it's just a little signal kind of to show all players uh that you're that you're ready and it gives you a designated spot for the card that you're playing and the cards that you haven't played yet um or that you're that you're passing. Also, the other product design decision that I thought was really clever is that you have these point tokens.

So, you whenever you gain points, you gain the point tokens right away. You also have this dial though that has uh 15 points on it, but they're actually each point on there is representative of 20 points in the game. So whenever you have 20 point tokens, you discard them and you move up one on this hidden tracker and you keep that tracker private.

So there are lots of games where you have to keep like all of your points private till the end of the game, which ends up being a little clunky, a little inconvenient. This game says at any given time, I can look across the table and see how many point tokens someone has, but because they keep their dial face down, I can't see how many sets of 20 points they've already gained.

that information is technically out there. I could be counting at all times to keep track of that, but it's too much to keep track of. Um, it isn't even something that you need to keep private. But I just thought it was a nice way to mitigate the need to have hundreds and hundreds of point tokens at different denominations.

Just when you get up to 20, discard them and and turn this little dial. Really clever choice there. So, lots of really clever design decisions and product design decisions in Fairy Ring. I'd love to hear your thoughts if you've played it or if you can think of any other games similar to it. Let me know in the comments below.

Thanks.