Found Findorff with Friese, Then Fetch Fancy Feathers

• German publisher 2F-Spiele has announced details on its two new games from designer Friedemann Friese, games that will debut at SPIEL '22 in early October, then head to retail outlets, with Rio Grande Games releasing the titles in the U.S.

Friese's large design for 2022 is Findorff, and it seems akin to 2020's Finishing Time and Faiyum in the flow of actions among the 1-5 players, with everyone taking one action on a turn and a reset action occurring at different times for each player depending on their particular pace of play. Here's background info on the setting:

Quote:

Findorff is one of the 23 districts of Bremen, the hometown of Friedemann Friese. Findorff has three "F"s and is named after Jürgen Christian Findorff (1720-1792), who was responsible for draining and surveying the bog in the north of Bremen, for extracting the peat, and for populating the bog with residents.

In Findorff, the game, you build up the district of Findorff in the period from 1803 to 1916. Historically, six major railway stations stood in Findorff during this period to connect to Hannover, Hamburg, Oldenburg, and Bremerhaven. While they were all later replaced by a single big main train station, you raise another three new rail stations at one of the two main roadbeds. Besides using boats on the peat canal, this small railway helped to transport even more peat from the bog in the north of Bremen to Findorff. During the first half of the 19th Century, peat was the most important commodity for heating the houses and for supplying energy to the industry. In the late 19th century (and in the game), peat lost its importance once when replaced by the energy-rich coal.

As the rules (available here) stress, your focus in Findorff will be on raising structures in town. Each player starts with some of the 25 structures in hand — either a fixed set or via draft — with the remaining structures being part of an open market.

On a turn, you take the action where your foreman is located on your personal action board, or you move the foreman 1-3 spaces down the board (possibly circling back to the top) to a different action. When you pass over the end of your board, you take a bureaucracy action that burns peat, adds rails to the roadbed, resets your workers (with one of them dying), and possibly earns your income, then you take your chosen action.

The actions are purchase, hire, produce, and sell. You purchase action tiles (which allow you to take an action more than once during a single turn), production tiles (for bricks, peat, and rails, the game's three resources), or a structure, whether one in hand or one from the market. When you purchase a structure, you pay the cost and gain either a one-time bonus, income during each of your bureaucracy steps, or an upgrade to an action. If you purchase from the market, you must place one of your hand cards in the market. You hire 1 worker for each icon on your action board. You produce goods by placing workers on one of your production tiles, with a limit of ten goods in your personal warehouse. You sell peat to the market (with the price rising and falling as supply fluctuates, akin to Power Grid), sell rails for construction of the railroad (which initially burns peat, driving up prices, while adding peat to the market in the second half of the game), and build houses in Findorff.

The game ends when the second roadbed is complete, with players earning victory points for remaining resources, money on hand, and (most crucially) structures built.

The second title from Friese and 2F-Spiele is Fancy Feathers, a card game for two players, although with multiple copies of the game you can compete with up to six players at a time. Here's an overview:

Quote:

In Fancy Feathers, by order of your baroness, you begin to search for noble pheasants for the pheasantry, moving along a path via a simply but really tricky mechanism, collecting valuable cards and avoiding annoying ones. Sadly, you are not alone. Snatch the most beautiful birds to finish the game with the most precious animal collection.

When setting up, choose six of the twelve card types included in the game. In total, 924 different combinations are possible! Shuffle the cards, then remove from the game as many cards as three times the number of players, then lay out five cards face up in a row, placing the player tokens in a random stack. On a turn, move your token as far along the row as you wish to land on a card or another player token. If at the start of your turn you were alone on a card and at the back of the row, collect the card you were on, along with any others behind you. After you move, if necessary, lay out cards from the deck so that five cards lie in front of the player who is farthest down the row, then whoever is farthest back in the row takes the next turn.

One of the twelve card types

Once the final cards from the deck have been placed in the row, you can choose to exit the row instead of moving, and the game is now over for you. Once all players have exited, tally your scores to see who has the most points.

Fancy Feathers works with up to six players. but to play with more than two people, you need additional copies of the game to have the required numbers of animal cards and wooden discs.

One of my favorite games for 5-6 players is That's Life!, a Kramer and Kiesling design from 2005, and in that roll-and-move game when you're the last token to leave a tile, you claim that tile, which is grants either negative or positive points or is a gift that transforms a negative tile to a positive one. Fancy Feathers seems like it will appeal to me along the same lines, although now you have the freedom to move as much as you wish combined with the uncertainty of what you'll collect beyond the card upon which you land (assuming you don't land on top of someone else, which is possible).

Hi, dere!