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The moonlight glistens and you know what that means. Nope, no werewolves or scary stuff here (even though we are in Halloween season!). It’s time for the fairies to wake up! Winter is coming so magical preparations must be afoot (or should that be a-wing?).
Luckily, the mushrooms are totally onboard with this, and are popping up to offer their services. But what takes the fairies’ fancy? A morel motel, maybe? A porcini palace, perhaps? Well, let’s create a marvellous mushroom village and find out!
Field Estate!
FAIRY RING is a close drafting game where players are building mushroom towers for fatigued fairies to use in order to rest their wings. But they can’t get too comfortable because the more spots they can step on, the more mana they can collect! And with only two seasons to scoop up the sweet stuff, the race is on!
Set up in a synch and the rules are super easy to learn. Once everybody has their village border tile in front of them (with their starter mushroom in place), a hand of cards, their scoring wheel, and have picked their fairy, it’s time to get building! Having simultaneously revealed a card from your hand, its time to decide whether to plant a new mushroom or grow an existing mushroom of the same type. The card that you have laid into your village will show a number of movement points, and your fairy then flies over that many mushrooms in a clockwise order. If your fairy lands on a mushroom in your own village, you’ll take mana (totalled up from all the cards making up that mushroom) from the middle of the table. If your fairy lands on a mushroom in another player’s village, they will get the mana. BUT. And this is a brilliantly big but (and I like big buts of course haha): If you have the same mushroom in your village as the landed mushroom, you also get a mana reward!
The hand of card you have then gets passed to the next player and it starts again. When Season 1 ends (after everybody has played 6 cards), you move on to the Season 2 cards, and the process begin again. 12 turns in total.
Final Thoughts!
We are having lots of fun with the fairies! It’s such an easy game to learn but the decisions are fun and do not overwhelm. Go big or go wide is what building boils down to, but a lot will depend on how your opponents’ villages are shaping up. And we love games that take us out of our own heads and make it essential to keen a beady eye on other players! There are player ais to help with the 3 steps in your first few games. But they quickly become unnecessary and instead more useful for the reference information on the reverse as gameplay is easy to understand.
Some of our favourite games use close drafting as a way of increasing the tension in what card to take, and this is no different. Being able to see what mushrooms folks have (or might want to copy) makes choosing which cards to give them extra spicy!
The conversion rate for mana to points is 20:1 so you are going to want to grow your mushrooms to strengthen their value and abilities for bigger rewards. But you are also going to want to spread your village base to ensure that (a) as many opposing fairies stay within your borders for as long as possible, and (b) you have mushrooms to match those in other villages! Power v Diversification. Ooh! Nice!
And each mushroom has a different scoring power – Academies give you mana equal to fairy movements. Conversely, Pollenariums allow you to gather mana x number of mushrooms in your village! So the more cards comprising a single mushroom, the more times it will trigger on a single visit.
The components are beautiful – everything about it seems to sparkle even without glitter and the wee fairies and scoring tokens are super cute. It felt quite tight pushing the standees into their bases but they are definitely solid and won’t fall over now! It also works well at all player counts. The sweetest spot is probably 3P, but that’s just so that there are more village spots to hop over and land on, and we are also really enjoying Fairy Ring at two.
There are also optional additional Objective Cards which you can mix in and add 3 further mini races to gain mana (once per objective only). We included these from our first game, and again they are simple to understand and add just a little bit extra to add into the decisions you make.
Fairy Ring is a lovely game and we are looking forward to our next meander about the mushroom ring already!
