Sometimes, when you’re shopping for games, you’ll pick up something on an impulse or simply because the price is right. While looking for another specific game, that’s exactly how I stumbled upon Fantasy: The Family Card Game. It was a good price at the time, so I picked up a deck.
This is one of the easiest card games I have ever come across. Each player starts with five cards, draws one and plays one face-up on the table, with each player repeating the process until the entire deck has been drawn. The game stops once a player has run out of cards completely. Each card you play is a creature from one of seven races (Gnome, Fairy, Imp, Hobgoblin, Dryad, Elf and Goblin) with each one having its own power, which you enact immediately upon play.
Each power helps improve your chances at winning, including drawing cards and stealing from other players. The Fairy is the most unique of the races, because her power involves putting a stop to an opposing players move, no matter what it is, and can be played at any time. These different creatures form the population of your community, and the object is to have the biggest population at the end of the game.
And…well, that’s pretty much it. The game has one of the smallest, shortest instructions books I’ve ever seen, and the final result is a very simple, quick-playing card game. To a certain extent, the structure reminds me of the fictional game Mystic Warlords of Ka’a from The Big Bang Theory television show. It’s an easy game to play and a round can end in 15 minutes or less.
Overall, Fantasy is nothing you’re going to go out of your way to get, but if you’ve got a few extra bucks (my copy cost $5.00 USD) and/or small kids at home, it might be a fun one to add to your collection. It’s especially great for kids due to the easy play and the fact that the instructions for the cards are literally printed on every individual card, so there’s little room for error. On that same note, the race of each card is printed across the top of the card with an accompanying nicely-drawn illustration of each character.
Not a great game, but tough to be too harsh on due to the price alone. The fact that it’s so accessible for kids (if you have a family) is certainly a plus.
