Stuffed Fables Review

“Is everyone ready?” an exasperated Stitch snapped, “It’ll be morning before we start at this rate!”

“I’m ready!” yelled Piglet, “I love Stuffed Fables nights!”

“sshhh!” hissed Theodora, “you’ll wake the mistress!” 

“Is Stuffed Fables the scary stories…?” stammered Lumpy, inching back towards the comfort blanket.

“Oh yes!” said Flops, “but don’t forget! You’ve got your meat tenderiser if you need to fight any monsters!”

“Oh yeah,” said Lumpy, picking the spiked wooden mallet off the duvet and cradling it in his over-sized cotton fists, “I love my meat tenderiser.”

Players: 2-4
Time: 60-90 mins
Ages: 7+
Designer: Jerry Hawthorne
Artist: Regis Demy, Kristen Pauline
Publisher: Plaid Hat Games

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Stuffed Fables is as close as you can get to Toy Story, the game. An adventure of sentient stuffed toys protecting their young girl from the nasty nightmares that threaten to ruin her sleep. All classic storybook stuff, coming in a grand story book all of its own.

It’s this central component that most strongly grabbed my attention when Stuffed Fables was announced. Not the miniatures, not the theme, not even a stuffed elephant with a meat tenderiser. A book of maps. This is such a cool component. A book that you play over, the pages becoming the actual surface for gameplay. Talk about using a component to reinforce your game’s theme!

Where other games come with a pile of cardboard map pieces, here each page of the book is a new map and it allows for a ton more varied content than any comparable game. Each of Stuffed Fables’ 7 scenarios features a branching story spread across several pages of this book, giving you reason to come back and explore alternative routes. You’ll see a wealth of places and locations, from the comfortable surroundings of the little girls’ bedroom, to the nightmare landscapes of the Fall, the land of lost toys in which the stories villain resides. They are all perfectly child friendly, in that kind of 80s kids movie kind of way. You know, with a dark streak.

Gameplay is very simplistic, befitting its preferred audience of families with young-ish kids. On a turn you draw 5 of the colourful dice from the bag and use them to take actions. Pick a dice, decide what to do with it, and roll it. The white dice are always used to heal your ‘stuffies’, the black dice must always go to the nasty threat track, to trigger monster attacks and other negative events. But the others are yours to play with. Moving (yes, this is a roll and move), attempting tests on various cards or scenario events, or using the colour-specific power of that die. Red dice can be used for combat attacks, green dice for ranged attacks, and yellow for search the area for new items.

This can have the unfortunate effect of leaving you unable to do what you need because of the dice you draw but Stuffed Fables does a pretty good job of mitigating this, in two ways. Firstly, there are purple wild dice that can be used as any other colour. Secondly, and more importantly, you can give characters dice to store between turns. These stored dice are your main way of defending against enemy attacks, so are important for that reason, but they also let me, the melee focused elephant, pass you, the arrow firing bunny, my spare green die to help you cause some damage next round. And that is a very nice element of the game, encouraging you to be aware of your teammates and feel like you’re helping each other out.

This is a simple system, perhaps a little too simple for determined gamers to take seriously. I mean, you’re not going to be replacing Gloomhaven with this. But then, in other ways, it seems rather too complicated for kids to fully grasp. As with so many dungeon crawlers, Stuffed Fables can end up throwing rather too many different rules and exceptions at its players. The core I described above is fine and while I am short of small humans to test it on, I’m sure an attentive parent could guide them through those core decisions. But there’s still a load more to this game.

Take those player boards. Most of the space is given over to those heart abilities, which can be triggered using the heart tokens you will occasionally come across. But it’s an arduous slog for me to get through all those extra rules, let alone a young kid. Then add on the item cards, the status effect cards, all of which affect a single character and I know I’d struggle a little to keep on top of all those elements were I responsible for a running an entire game.

Then you have the best, and arguably worst, feature of this game: the storybook. On the opposite page to each map is a literal page of text, with story and rules associated with this map. I stress, this is fantastic. You get a fun bit of story to introduce each new map page, each map can have unique mechanical twists, events can trigger with more stories and gameplay effects based on where players move or what they do, or after the pool of black dice on the threat track builds to a certain number. Every new page is a new adventure and discovering those new elements are often a treat!

But every new page is a mammoth reading task as well. Which is fine for the excellently written story segments, less so for the rules. You can just see the kids getting agitated as Mummy or Daddy reads through the new tweaks, thinks them through and explains what’s happening, all before the fun can get going. And this will happen after each trigger. By and large, things are well constructed but there have been plenty of times where it hasn’t been clear how you finish a map and progress to the next one. If you don’t want to spoil the scenario for yourself, there’s a degree of faith required, and I only hope you don’t miss anything, else a map will likely fall flat as you re-read the entire page trying to piece things together. That’s the last thing you want to have happen on family game night!

So it feels a little too complicated for younger kids to fully enjoy the game. By the time they are old enough to play it for themselves, alone, they are also probably old enough to be put off by the theme. And then for fully adult players the core gameplay is just a little simple, where you know it has been streamlined for kids. Stuffed Fables runs a risk of not managing to truly excel for any target market…

However.

I’ve gone quite in depth about how Stuffed Fables falls short but where it absolutely doesn’t let you down is in theme and story. If you look at stuffed Fables, it’s cutesy art and miniatures, and giggle with glee, you will absolutely forgive it it’s weaknesses. Even card carrying gamers, there’s just enough gameplay here to carry you through the story.

Stuffed Fables engages with its setting with gusto. The scenarios are the perfect level of quaint child-world peril: the first night in the big girl bed, not wetting the bed. And the difficulties you face in the dream world reflect these scenarios, like a flooding landscape and raging rivers in the bed wetting challenge. The writing is so excellent that you can’t help but go along with the toys’ sense of drama, and the scenario structure is such that there’s rarely too long between snippets of story.

There are 7 long, possibly overly long for one sitting, scenarios to play through, which are perhaps best split into two sessions especially in a family setting. But the multi-page structure to a scenario makes this easy to do, and creates that little bit of extra replay value in the multiple routes you can take through the scenario. But it is a close thing. It’s just enough for me to be happy with it, but I don’t quite feel comfortable calling it generous either.

That’s the line Stuffed Fables seems to walk. Not fascinating gameplay wise, but engaging enough to get you through. Not incredibly generous content wise, but by no means bad either. Not truly perfect for any particular player. But with the excellent work on the stories and theme, if you love the look of the game then you, and your family, will almost certainly enjoy it!

 

Rating: Patchwork

 

Our copy of Stuffed Fables was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy from your local hobby store for £64.99 RRP.