Finally, I managed to get to try out Fairy Tale, a game by Japanese company Yuhodo and designed by Satoshi Nakamura. This is an interesting game of drafting and playing cards over four rounds. In each round, players are dealt a hand of 5 cards. They select one card to keep and pass the remainder to the player on their left. That player selects a card and returns three to the original player. This is repeated but with the player on the right and the final card is kept by the original player. From the five cards collected, players choose one simultaneously and these are revealed with any actions specified on the card being implemented immediately. This is repeated twice further, with the two unplayed cards then being discarded. Cards played stay in front of you but through the card actions may end up face-up or face-down by the end of the game. After the fourth round, face down cards at that point do not score and face up ones are totalled to give your score, highest score wins.

This is an interesting game where you try to accumulate combinations of cards that give high scores, while messing with other players’ plans. The difficulty we had was with the card explanations, which I managed to print off in such small type-face that Nige couldn’t read much of it - it’s his age, you know. The cards have icons which help to decrypt the meaning but it did take a little while to work it all out. That said, by the end of the game we had just about got it sussed so it shouldn’t present a problem in future. Choosing what to keep and what to pass on was interesting. On one occasion, I had to keep a card that was of no use to me merely because it would have made a huge difference to Nige’s score. However, you can afford to do this because, of the five cards you pick, you only get to play 3 of them, so 2 spoilers is ok. Having overcome the icon problems, I quite liked this and would like to try it with a full compliment of five players so all the cards are used. It is pretty quick once you get into the game and is a bit different to a lot of games we play at the end of an evening. Oh, and I won so that brought the evening to a nice close (although Nige might not agree).