Faeries and Magical Creatures Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Faeries and Magical Creatures, a light euro game published by Forbidden Games. Faeries and Magical Creatures is a deck building, tile laying, and area control game.

Glenn Drover and Forbidden Games go together like peanut and jelly: Racoon Tycoon, Railroad Rivals, Lizard Wizard, and Mosaic: A Story of Civilization have all had varying amounts of success.

Now this dynamic duo have teamed up again to bring us Faeries & Magical Creatures. Can this reach the heights of their strongest pairings, or will this merely be a footnote in their history together?

Faeries & Magical Creatures is an action selection game where each turn, players will be choosing one of five simple actions to take. Unlike more traditional action selection games, Faeries & Magical Creatures borrows from games like Race for the Galaxy and Earth where each player gets to act on each other player’s turn as well. This means that if Player 1 chooses Helping Hand, each other player gets to do Helping Hand as well.

To balance this mechanism out, the active player always gets to play a card from their hand. These cards are the real meat and potatoes of the game. See, one of the actions that players can take is Befriend a Faerie, which allows them to draft a new card from the public splay. These cards modify certain actions, introduce thievery, give extra points at the end of the game for reaching certain conditions, and so on.

Faeries & Magical Creatures also has a spatial puzzle and area control element. One action players can take is to Build a Garden. These garden pieces are tetrominoes that players will be placing on their personal player board to cover up bonus squares for extra actions. These tiles can be played path-side up, or garden-side up.