Fabled Fruit Review

If you go down to the woods today you’re sure of a big surprise. Because I know I didn’t have particularly high hopes for Fabled Fruit, the latest creation of Friedman Friese, designer of Power Grid, Friday and the infamous 504. After all, it’s in many ways another kitchen sink of mechanics with a pasted on theme, no? No…? No, no, no! Well, yes, but that’s not a bad thing at all.

 

 

Players: 2-5

 

Time: 30 mins

 

Ages: 8+

 

 

 

 

Fabled Fruit sees you and up to 4 friends (or other animals) bouncing around the jungle collecting and occasionally stealing fruit to create wondrous smoothies for the local animal population. Including a penguin, a moose, a sheep and a walrus but that’s not really the weird thing is it? Because I’m pretty sure the last time I saw a rhino sipping on a mocktail was in a particularly vivid fever dream. But theme isn’t really the point of this game. It’s all in the mechanics.

Of which there are many! So many that you can’t possibly use them all at once (though we’ll get on to that later). The top 24 cards of this gigantic stack are placed out to form 6 action spaces, one for each type of animal you just drew, with matching cards piled up on the spot. Then the game is a kind of worker placement/action selection type system, whereby players will move their little animal meeple between locations, without ever leaving the playing area. You aren’t blocked from a location either, but you do have to pay people in fruit to invade their personal space, a ritual I was disappointed to see was not active on the London Underground. Since getting fruit is basically the aim of the game, this is a sufficiently punitive penalty that deciding whether to pay it or not (taking a less ideal action instead) is a properly taxing decision.

So what are these magical fruits that they may be described as fabled? Why, they must be the most wondrous of all the fruits! Have you come across… strawberries!? These were once common in the UK but now with Brexit all strawberries are committed to our one remaining industry: jam. We also have the legendary bananas that don’t turn into mushy brown hate-fuel in 5 minutes, the coconuts carried by the African (not European) swallow, the actual grapes of wrath and, of course, the king of all fruits, the fabled pineapple.

With these juicy wonders you’ll be trying to create the sets that make up each animal’s favourite smoothie. For example, if you check out the cards a few pics up, you’ll see the turtle wants one of each kind of fruit, whereas the moose wants – wait,

That moose is totally tripping balls. Carefully feed him the three coconuts and one other (which is what the cocktail symbol means). When you visit an animal you can either perform the action it offers or you can trade in your burgeoning armfuls of fruit to create the smoothie, bringing you one cool beverage closer to sweet, sweet victory. The first player to reach some target number will win the game. Note: it is compulsory in the Creaking Shelves house to name your smoothie as you make it.

This is where things get really interesting, because Fabled Fruit is the first in a new breed of game: the “fable” game. Well, half new, as it is basically soft-core Legacy. You have an evolving system with new mechanics being introduced over the course of several games, but you have none of the destruction of the full legacy experience. No stickers, no writing on things, no card tearing. You can, with only minimal effort, reset the game to the very start and play from the beginning. In many ways, it is the best of both worlds. How does it work?

Well, as you complete a smoothie you take that card to track how many you’ve made, and draw a new one from the giant stack to replace it. But new cards add in new mechanisms and create new spaces to move to in the play area. Thus your options change as you play. By your 3^rd or 4^th game (and each game is only half an hour long) you’ll be playing in a very different way to the start. This is wonderful, and I wholeheartedly recommend you don’t look through the stack or the reference booklet before you start. Looking forward to discovering the new elements is an absolute treat and one of the best parts of the game. One of the early mechanical additions is so nice it completely sells the Fabled system by itself and I’m not going to spoil it for you here.

 

Naturally, if you go back and play the game later this element of surprise will be lost, but with new players its hard not to share in their joy of discovery. Not every new card will blow your mind, but each will make you stop and think, how does this change my game? And it will! I’ve promised not to spoil the cards that come out later, so let’s just look at the starting set. The rhino just grabs a couple of fruit cards with its horns. The turtle is a notorious gambler (as any zoologist will tell you) and triggers a push your luck mechanic: you keep flipping cards off the fruit deck until you choose to stop (taking everything) or reveal a repeated fruit, which turtle despises (as you can see from his juice requirement!)

There are some take that mechanisms too. Personally I’m fine with that in a half hour game, particularly as they tend not to be too harsh and often give the victim some degree of control over the cards they lose. For example, the antelope lets you swap one of your bananas for two of your opponent’s cards. But your opponent choses those cards. It can still be hilariously effective when they were just about to grab a juice and didn’t have any spare fruits, but is hardly devastating most of the time. There are some more random take that elements in the stack, but like I said, it’s a half hour game and doesn’t need to be taken too seriously.

Indeed, even with its legacy elements I would put Fabled Fruit firmly in the filler category. But those legacy elements mean that one juicy mouthful just isn’t nearly enough and I could easily see you playing several games to keep exploring that mysterious stack. Put it this way: I took this to a convention the other week and we played 9 games of it in a row. 9! That’s a crazy amount and we still only made it a third of the way through the stack! It was last thing at night, but that’s probably where this game shines, especially if you have a regular group to play with. But don’t think you need to have the same 4 people week in week out, people can just drop in at any point, there might just be a few more rules to explain at once.

Now, obviously if you care a lot about theme in your games then this one might not be for you. But for everyone else this one that deserves a closer look. Experimental and weird? Granted. But a lot of fun? Absolutely!

 

Rating: Smooth

 

Check out the other Essen releases I saw and played! Here’s the Essen list.