FAIRY RING
The scores keep mushrooming…
Designer: Laurence Grenier & Fabien Tanguy | Publisher: Repos Production 40m 2-48+ £32
It took me a long time to enjoy learn to enjoy mushrooms. For most of my childhood I was a very fussy eater, and it wasn’t until a friend tricked me with a pizza secretly filled with fungus that I began to appreciate it. That friend would enjoy Fairy Ring, a game where you’ll need to use towering stacks of mushrooms in devious ways to score as many points as possible.
There’s an unusual mechanism at the heart of Fairy Ring; each player sets up cards in a line in front of them, and that line forms a figurative ring around the table. Each turn you will move your Fairy token a number of cards to the left—once they leave your row of cards they immediately land on the right-most card of the player’s row next to you. So all the Fairies are constantly circling around the table, permanently connecting your personal tableau to the wider game. I’m used to card laying leading to solo-puzzle style games, and Fairy Ring turns this on its head.