How To Play Fungi

Fungi is a game for two players. The basic premise of the game is that both players are cooks who are competing to produce the most savoury mushroom-based dishes. During the game, players will forage for mushrooms, gather others ingredients and helpful items such as a basket and then cook using the ingredients to hand. Victory is based on the nature of the dishes prepared with Flavour points (victory points) being awarded.

Preparation

In Fungi, each player starts with one frying pan, the most essential tool at your disposal. The card with the shoes represents to the start of the forest trail and is placed between both players to one side (the rules pamphlet gives a useful layout guide to help you in the set up). The stick cards form a separate draw pile and are double sided so you can easily distinguish them from other cards. The night cards also form their own separate draw pile.

The remaining cards form a forest draw pile. Draw eight of these cards to represent the forest, starting with the two spaces adjacent to the shoes card; the cards furthest away are then deeper into the forest. The areas to either side of the forest are player display areas. There is also a Decay pile, located at the nearest end of the Forest.

Each player then receives 3 overview cards depicting actions to take on your turn, at the end of your turn and finally a card summary respectively. Each player also receives one pan and three forest cards. These three cards represent a player’s starting hand, but look out for basket cards, which are put into your display, moon cards which are discarded, but then allow you to draw a night card into your hand as a replacement or Fly agaric cards which are simply discarded with no replacement, at this stage.

Turn sequence

Each turn, a player may carry out one action from a range of five options. These are as follows:

a) Take one card out of the Forest. You may take a card from the forest and place it in your hand. You have a hand size limit of eight cards and you may never have more than eight cards at any time, so you can’t draw one and discard one. However, you can extend your hand size by playing a Basket card. These basket cards never go into your hand; if you draw one, place it into your display. Each basket extends your hand size by two.

Note also, if you take this option, you may take one of the two cards ‘at your feet’ ie next to the shoes or deeper into the forest. For each space away from the shoes, you will need to use and discard one stick card. So, to take the card furthest away, you will need six stick cards. Gaining stick cards is therefore useful to allow you a greater choice of card picks rather than being limited to the two options immediately in front of you. More on sticks a bit later!

If you take a Moon card, discard it and draw a Night card instead. Night cards are special because they count as two mushrooms, but only take up one space in your hand. Apparently, mushrooms gathered under moonlight are even more delicious, so these cards can enhance your dishes and therefore increase your score accordingly.

If you pick a Fly agaric card, it is immediately placed in your display and your hand size is immediately reduced to four cards and this lasts whilst the card is in your hand, although note that baskets still extend hand size. At the end of your next turn, the Fly agaric card is discarded and your previous hand size limit is restored. It is possible if you have cards in your hand that you want to discard, the Fly agaric card could be used as a positive choice to discard these as otherwise they are still in your hand and count towards your hand size limit.

b) Take all the cards out of the decay pile. Resolve all the moon, basket and Fly agaric cards and then add any remaining forest cards to your hand, observing the hand limit. If you collect baskets from the decay pile, they can immediately increase your hand size and you can benefit from this immediately.

c) Cook three or more identical types of mushrooms. This is the heart of Fungi and the way to score points to win the game. To cook, you play the set of mushroom cards onto a pan in your display or together with a pan card from your hand into your display. Once played, the set of pan and mushroom cards remain until the end of the game and cannot be added to nor the pan reused, so there is the decision to make, get a set of mushrooms out early and free up hand space or build a greater set, if possible, for more points. It should also be noted that this action only allows you to cook one set of mushrooms at a time and therefore to cook your second and subsequent sets, you will need more pans!

Note: You may have collected Butter and Cider cards. You can use butter together with a set of four or more mushroom cards and cider together with a set of five or more cards. This may be more time consuming in terms of collecting cards and risking reaching your hand size limit, but each butter card so used yields an extra three points and cider cards yield five points. So, if you are prepared to take the time, it could increase your overall score, but these cards must be played at the same time you cook the mushrooms.

d) Sell two or more identical types of mushrooms. If you have two or more identical types of mushrooms in your hand, you may sell them to gain sticks; note that a single night card counts as two mushrooms and so can be sold for sticks on its own. You may only sell one type of mushrooms this way for each action. Discard the mushroom cards and take a number of stick cards equal to the value depicted on the upper left and right of each card. If you run out of stick cards, you can use anything else as a substitute eg tokens, markers, counters etc.

e) Put down 1 Pan. You may play one Pan card into your display and so in subsequent rounds you may use it to cook a set of mushrooms with. You may want to do this if you have no set of mushrooms that you are ready to cook with, either because you have no sets or you are looking to build bigger and better sets, or equally, it removes the Pan card from your hand thus freeing up a space.

At the end of your turn

Once your turn is over, you must perform the following three steps. You could call this a clean-up phase:

1. Move the card closest to the decay pile on to the decay pile. This will be the nearest card in the Forest and adjacent to the shoe card. There is a limit of four cards in the decay pile. Once a fifth is moved to it, the previous four cards are discarded and the fifth forms a new pile.

2. Move all the cards still on the Forest track down one or two spaces towards the decay pile.

3. Draw a new card to fill each of the one or two spaces left. The next player then begins their turn.

End game and scoring

Fungi ends immediately as soon as the last card in the Forest has been taken.

Now count all the flavour points on all mushroom cards in your display area. These points are located under the Pan symbol on each card in the top left and right of each mushroom card. Add any points from Butter or Cider cards, if the cards qualify, and using a night card in a set will double the total flavour points yield for that set.

The player with the highest score wins and in cases of a tie, the player with the most mushroom cards in their display wins with Night cards still counting as two mushrooms. Enjoy the game!

Tell us your thoughts on Fungi by heading over to our Instagram!