Fairy Tale Inn Review

In Fairy Tale Inn your town is flooded with Fairy Tale characters who are desperate for some where to stay for the night. Can you get them to stay at your Inn and put them in the best rooms to score you the most coins? Let’s wave a wand and take a look!

What Big Eyes You Have!

The first thing you notice when looking at this game is the board. It’s a grid that you drop tokens into similar to connect four or the match games. Fairy Tale Inn itself is nothing like those games though. This is a tile placement game set in a unique board. The game itself is closer to something like Tiny Towns than connect four so don’t let just glancing at this game put you off for fear of it being too simple.

Set up is quick, just place the grid between the players. Then decide which characters you will be playing with this round and lay out the tiles on the guest list board. Hand out the starting coins and that’s it! You’re ready to open your doors and accept guests to your Fairy Tale Inn.

Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?

On each turn you choose a character to take and place into the grid with the colourful side of the token showing to you. The characters are either free to take or cost an amount of coins depending on where they are on the guest list board. All of the Fairy Tale characters have different requirements for placement that if you fulfil these will gain you coins.

The Big Bad Wolf for example gains you coins at the end of the game. He gives you 3 coins for each row where you have more Wolf tokens than your opponent.

Not By The Hair On My Chinny, Chin Chin!

The Little Pig gives you a coin for each of your other little pigs that are connected to this token and when you play Jack he gives you a coin and an extra token to place above him, the beanstalk token.

All of the characters offer something unique and interesting and as you don’t use all of them each game you can try out different mixes and keep the game fresh.

The only character that I thought was unbalanced compared to the others was The Evil Queen. For her you only gain a coin if your opponent places a token directly above The Evil Queen. The coin does come from your opponents stash but really it didn’t feel enough or likely enough to happen to warrant taking her when other characters are available.

Wish Upon A Star

The game ends when three columns of the Inn are fully occupied with tokens. Then you move to any end game scoring characters like Pinocchio where you gain a coin for each of your opponents characters that are next to Pinocchio or Little Red Riding Hood where you gain a coin for each of your characters that are next to Little Red.

Finally, count up your gold coins and the player with the most, wins!

I Am Able To Enchant All Creatures

The artwork for Fairy Tale Inn is absolutely beautiful. Bright, colourful and unique takes on familiar characters drew my son in. My 9 year old got this for his birthday and he loved playing it. It’s nice to have a game specifically for 2 players when we just want a quick game between us. It was quick but teaches strategy and placement which will lead my son into other more complicated games as he gets a bit older. Adult wise though I really enjoyed it! It’s definitely a game I’m excited to play when he suggests it and I may have had a few games with my husband too!

My 6 year old also enjoyed playing it as although his planning of placement wasn’t there he still enjoyed the token drop element and gaining coins. Again, the theme is very engaging for them.

I would be very interested in an expansion with more characters if they made it too.

The components are of good quality and the grid is in one piece so there’s no trying to click things together or chance of breaking it in the process.

This has filled a unique spot in our gaming cupboard and we’ll keep trying to place Princesses diagonally or over-run the board with the Pied Pipers Rats whenever we get a chance!