Board Game: Fantasy Frontier

Cool! They've got a blimp!

The Game: Fantasy Frontier
The Publisher: Gamelyn Games, but they don't seem to be selling it anymore
Time: About an hour
Players: Me, Michelle, Cael

Game Play: Fantasy Frontier is one of the many board games that kinda sat in my closet for a long time because while it looked interesting, it never quite hooked us. But it's got cool meeples, and that's appealing, so we pulled it out yesterday. 

Fantasy Frontier, while the title sounds like an adult toy/book store off an interstate in Wyoming, is actually a worker placement game. Everyone controls an airship with five workers, representative of one of four factions. Each faction has a special little bonus - the one I played, the Skyflower, gets to move one space for free every turn even if they don't assign a worker to be a pilot, which I have to admit I found really helpful. 

Let's be honest, punching out the cardboard tokens is a big part of the fun of a new board game

Every turn, you assign your five workers and then have them do their jobs in order. The order depends on which job; attacking and piloting in phase one, disembarking (to gather resources or build a township) in phase two, research and scouting (allowing you to get new cards or terrain tiles) in phase three. Also, some jobs require more workers. You can blast the ground, removing a terrain tile, but it's three of your five workers. 

Terrain tiles come in one of four flavors (water, mountain, plains, forest), and yield different types of resources. You can only build towns on plains, but the real trick to tile placement is to match map cards. It's just like it sounds, you arrange the tiles to match the pattern on the map and then you get points. 

My game board with my workers at their stations

First player to score 40 victory points wins, and you can score them by attacking opponents, completing maps, or building townships. Building townships is a great way to get points (they're 10 each), but they're resource-heavy and collecting resources takes time. Making maps gets you as many as 7 points in a go, but making maps requires arranging tiles, which requires planning ahead to pick tiles out of the bag, place them, and blast tiles the right order, so it's the kind of strategy that requires keeping multiple balls in the air. Attacking others probably isn't a viable winning strategy, just because a successful attack only scores 1 point, but it also lets you damage an opponent's ship, rendering a given station inoperable until they repair it. You might not be able to win by plinking, but you can sure screw up someone's day by hitting their Blast Ground station on the right turn. 

The rather crazyquilt map

Opinions: I really enjoyed this game. I like worker placement anyway (I don't do write-ups for legacy games, but Charterstone was an amazingly good time), and this combines that strategy element with some Catan-like resource management, and some tile placement. It takes a few turns to see how everything fits together and there are a few rules that aren't especially well explained (or rather, are but aren't explained in quite the right place), but once you figure it out it flows really well.

The only real complaint I have is the size of the tiles. They're small enough that the airships crowd them, and it's hard to put meeples on the tiles (which you're supposed to do when the workers disembark). That's pretty minor, though.

Keep? Yep.