Published by CrowD Games and Moroz Dev Studio, this is a game where players are exploring and collecting books. It's not themed around bibliophiles, however. Conan the Librarian makes no appearance in the game. Designer Anatoly Okhapkin has set Fabled: The Spirit Lands as a creation myth, brought to life by some enchanting fantasy art from Alexandra Karenskaya, Maya Kurkhuli, Anna Laryushina, Nikolai Mitrukhin and Alexey Puzankov.
There's the option to play solitaire and in cooperative mode - particularly useful for teaching and learning the game - but Fabled is primarily designed as a competitive adventure game for 2-5 players where, over 10 rounds, you are laying out different terrain cards to connect and move along paths in order to collect and upgrade books so that you end up with the most high-ranking (red) books. The books you collect may ultimately represent victory points but they also form the currency of the game, in that you need to spend books in order to select and lay out terrain cards. Book conversion isn't an engine building process in Fabled: it's about finding the opportunities to upgrade and choosing your moment for optimal effect.
Players have their own character cards with their own asymmetric special ability. You start off with one character but you'll adopt others during the course of play: some rounds give you an extra character and ability while other rounds trigger an event card which will alter the rules for all players.
Game length varies according to the number of players but you can expect a two-player game to take around 40 minutes, and you can pretty much double that if you raise the player count to five. All the information in this game is open to all players: there are no cards held back in hand and there's no dice rolling - so tho' the theme may be light, this is a strategic game with a very low luck quotient. Some actions available to you will help other players - for example, by giving them additional movement on a path - so in competitive play you want to be sure that you aren't benefiting others more than yourself. And interaction in Fabled can be 'take that', with players sometimes placing out terrain deliberately to hamper an opponent.
Aside from the versatilty of having a game that you can play in either fully cooperative semi-cooperative or competitive mode, Fabled comes with several quite different 'challenge' scenarios, a wide choice of character cards and three different event decks. That means you're getting a lot of replayability, particularly as the asymmetric abilities that you have from your character cards alter the way you play. That's a big plus in a game with its own unique charm.