With finals complete and this semester in the record books, I can roll up my sleeves and get to some serious postin'.
And this post is to cater to the
gamers. I present to you, Fealty!
Fealty comes to us from the good
people at Asmadi Games, the guys behind We Didn't Play Test This At All (which, they totally do) and Win, Lose,
Banana. The basics break out as follows:
Number of Players: 2-4
Approximate Playtime: 15-40 minutes
The game combines some
of the best facets of older strategy games, namely the point-capture aspects of
Go and the piece variety/versatility of Chess, while keeping overall playtime
brief via a strict turn limit. Unlike most such strategy games, Fealty can
accommodate more than two players and has two distinct options that allow for
difficulty to be easily scaled based on the quantity and experience level of
said players (board size and piece options). It's fun, it's fast, and it gets
the old neurons firing. I won't recap the entirety of Fealty's rules, but the
elevator version of the game is as follows:
Players first select a
representative color (blue, yellow, red, or purple) and a correspondingly
colored deck of nine cards. There are two complete decks of nine cards for each
color, the Missives deck and the Suns deck, but only one such deck is used at a
time and players choose between them via consensus before the start of the
game. Each card within the deck provides critical information concerning the
abilities of a token denoted by a name and number that matches that on the
card. The constraints outlined on each card will allow players to decide how
and where to place the corresponding tokens on the board with the ultimate goal
of capturing as much of the latter as possible.
The selected decks are
shuffled, then placed face down before the individual players. Players draw a
hand of three cards from the top of the deck, which then present three
different options for play. After inspecting the cards, players will decide
which token they would like to place on the board by selecting the
corresponding card from the three available in their hand and placing it face
down in front of them. Once all players have made their choices, all selected
cards are revealed en masse and the matching tokens are placed (order of
placement depends on the individual cards revealed). Once each player has
placed one token a new card is drawn from the top of the deck (bringing the
player's hands back up to three apiece) and the process is repeated. After
eight such rounds, the board is then systematically divvied up between the
players in accordance with the abilities of each token placed. The player who
captures the most territory wins.
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| Layout for the two-person version of the game |
It may take a practice
round or two before you are comfortable with A) the basic abilities of each of
the nine tokens and B) how those abilities synergize with the overarching rules
of the game to present viable strategies for winning. It's recommended that new
players begin with the simpler Missives desk to help speed the familiarization
process along and that's some advice that I heartily echo. Though the game can
be easily picked up the jump in difficulty between the Missives and Suns decks
is marked so your best bet is to stick to the Missives until you're ready for a
fresh challenge.
The variety in
available terrain (there are several different board conglomerations) combined
with the abilities of the individual pieces and the element of semi-randomness
(which cards get drawn and in what order) makes for a very high degree of replay
ability. Games tend to be very fast, so it's easy to get multiple matches in a
short period of time. That being said, the sheer quantity of possible play
combinations occasionally causes a bit of confusion as to who is entitled to
what territory. The FAQ in the rulebook addresses most, but not all, of these
situations (which can be an opportunity to create some kick-ass house rules).
Also, though Fealty is designed to be a quick play, 4-player games can often
exceed the 40 minute mark so it may help to set some guidelines about turn
length before the start of the game.
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