Faeries & Magical Creatures is a card drafting, deck building, hand management game with polyominoes and area control scoring. It may sound like designer Glenn Drover has thrown in everything but the kitchen sink but all these different mechanics combine remarkably well to make a very accessible family-friendly game where you will each turn be choosing one of five actions, with other players all following suit to take the same action.
Players start off with a deck of four basic cards. Whatever action you choose, the player whose turn it is has the option to play a card from their hand, before or after taking their chosen action. You don't start off with cards in your hand tho', and drawing cards from your deck to your hand is one of the actions available to you. Taking an action to draft a card from the market display will add more powerful cards to your deck, and of course that of other players. Some cards are notably more powerful than others, so tho' other players all benefit when you choose the card drafting action, you have the advantage of getting first pick from the cards on display. As in most deck building games, when players draft cards in this way they usually go onto your discard pile, tho' there's a card that lets you take a drafted card directly into your hand. If you select the 'play a card' action, it's in addition to the card you routinely play on your turn so you play two cards while others are mandated to copy your action to play just one.
Building your garden is where the polyominoes come in. There's always a display of polyomino tiles equal to the number of players. These are all double-sided, showing a path on one side and flowers on the other. When you take the garden action, players all draft one of the tiles from the display. They can place tiles on their board either side up but the path tiles must all start at one of the edges, with subsequent path tiles joining those you've previously placed. Flower side up tiles can go anywhere on your board but they only score (a point per square) when adjacent to a path. Your board has icons on it giving bonus points and extra actions, and these are triggered whenever covered by any tile.
Finally, there are areas corresponding to the five different groups of magical creatures depicted on the cards. One of the actions you can take is to place a 'kinship' token in any of those five areas. The first player to place 10 kinship tokens in an area wins a tile that can be placed on your garden board to increase the score for adjacent tiles but you're mostly competing for area control. In end-game scoring, the player in each area with the most kinship tokens gets a point for every token in the area. Quite a few of the cards players will be drafting allow for manipulation of your own and others' kinship tokens...
This all makes for a fast-playing highly interactive game where the duplicated actions mean that all players are fully involved throughout. It's a game that can be played by older children and families but there's ample depth to hold the interest and attention of seasoned gamers.
But we've not mentioned the most striking feature of Faeries & Magical Creatures: the stunning art on all the cards. Annie Stegg Gerard's artwork is nothing short of magical: among the best we've seen in any board game!
Faeries & Magical Creatures is published by Forbidden Games and University Games.
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