Fast Forward Card Game #2: Fortress

Fortress comes from the Fast Forward series of games by designer Friedemann Friese. The hook with these games is two-fold: you don’t need to read a rulebook, and the game morphs over time. Flee-also from this series-is one of my favourite games, but it is very brain-burny, and is for a very niche audience. Fortress is a completely different beast, and although I wouldn’t call it mass market, it is certainly a lighter and more welcoming game.

How To Play

When you open the box, you are greeted by a pack of cards. And that’s it. No rulebook, just a pack of cards. You turn over the first card and start to read. The core of the game is introduced quickly, but over time, new rules are revealed.

The basic game is simple. There are a number of fortress cards in the centre of the table. On your turn, you can either draw a card or try to claim a fortress card. If you decide to draw then you will most likely receive a card with some serviceable art, and more importantly, a number. To claim a fortress card from the centre, you take the fortress into your play area, select a number of cards from your hand-all showing the same number-and place them facedown under the fortress card.

But what happens if one of your opponents has a fortress you want? Well, then you attack it. You do this by again, selecting cards from your hand that all show the same number. You give these cards to your opponent, and they check the value of your attacking cards against their defending cards under the fortress card to see if you’ve won or not. You work out the value of cards by taking the sum of all the numbers shown multiplied by the number of cards played.

For example, you pass three 2s to your opponent. That would have a value of (2+2+2) x 3 = 18. There is a handy-dandy grid to help you work out the most common values which is a nice touch. Your opponent compares this with their cards under the fortress. They have two 4s. (4+4) x 2 = 16. You’ve won! Hooray! You thieve their fortress and put your three 2s face down under it. Your opponent has to then give you one of their defenders, and take the rest back into their hand.

If I wanted to, I could then try to conquer another fortress. This goes on until either I decide to stop, or I get beaten by my opponent’s defenders. In this case, your opponent keeps the fortress, gives you your attackers back, and you have to give them any one card from your hand. Oh dear.

But There’s More

This is the simplest version of the game, and as you play, new rules will be introduced and new cards will appear. There is a nice, simple mechanism designed to make this happen seamlessly, without any pesky rulebook. The game ends when three hourglass cards have been drawn. These are just a way to limit the length of the game in a similar way to the dragons in Ethnos. When they’ve been drawn, you work out who has control of the most fortresses and that person is the lucky winner. All of their defending cards are removed from the game and put back into the game box. Five new cards are drawn from the deck and shuffled in with all the remaining cards you played with in the previous game.

In this way, there is a constant cycling of cards. Also, new cards and new rules can easily be introduced. I’m not going to spoil what happens as the game evolves. After about 13 games, you will have seen everything, content-wise, the game has to offer.

Is It Any Good

Fortress is a light game. It is also full of luck. That is generally a red flag for me in a game unless the game is very short, and fortunately, Fortress is very short. Some games can end speedily in a couple of minutes. The longest game probably lasts around 10 minutes or so. Due to the evolving nature of the game, I’ve never played just one game of Fortress: I’ve always played multiple games, getting through the full deck over the course of the play session. This takes just over an hour. If you don’t want to do this, it is easy to save your position in the game.

The main fun to be had in Fortress is bluffing. You can claim a fortress with just one card, but is that card a 1 or a 12? A fortress with two cards or more under it can have an even larger range. It’s great to scare off your opponent from challenging a fortress that you’ve only got a 1 under, and then end the game by having the final hourglass turn up.

Fortress is perfectly playable at 2 players, but it comes alive at 4. Fortresses can be won with cards of a much lower value which makes bluffing much more viable. Plus over time, you will know what is under certain fortresses and not others, so memory comes into the game too. This happens to a certain extent in games with a lower player counts but it feels a more integral part of the game with 4 players.

It does have a slight problem where in some games, you can feel like you had no chance to win. Sometimes you can bluff your way out of this, and sometimes you have to forget it and get on with the next game. This is not really too big a problem as the games are so short.

Conclusion

Fortress isn’t going to win any awards, but I’ve still got a soft spot for it. I love the idea of a game that you can pick up and play without reading a rulebook, and I also love a game that constantly evolves. There aren’t any major changes, but there’s enough to keep it interesting. I’d recommend you play it through first, but after that, it’s good for playing with people who are unfamiliar with modern board games. Playing it before means that you can quickly give examples or rule clarifications. So if you like light bluffing games, you could do worse than Fortress.