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This design immediately invites comparisons with the mainstream best-selling game Connect Four because in both games players drop pieces into a vertical grid that's seven columns wide by six rows tall while trying to create patterns. That's pretty much the extent of the similarities, but in some ways I wish CMON had made the comparison the centerpiece of a marketing campaign to place Fairy Tale Inn in mainstream outlets, if only to get some portion of the game-playing public to overlook that older game in favor of a far more interesting one.
To continue with the comparison, Connect Four is as basic as you can get: Players take turns dropping one piece at a time into a vertical grid, and the only difference between the pieces is their color. As soon as someone creates a row of four pieces in their color, they win.
Fairy Tale Inn includes eight types of pieces — cardboard tiles — but only five types will be used in a game, providing players variety in terms of gameplay since each type of tile has a special power associated with it. What differentiates ownership of a tile isn't color, but orientation; each tile is double-sided, with fully colored artwork on one side and a single-color outline on the other. If the artwork faces you, then the tile is yours; if not, it belongs to your opponent.
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Midgame shot after someone just dropped a tile
Which tiles will you drop in the grid? That decision is partly up to you, partly up to your opponent, and partly up to chance. At the start of the game, you draw four tiles at random from a bag, one by one, and place them in a column on a small card that lies between the players. On a turn, you can choose either of the two tiles on the bottom half of the column for free, while the second one from the top costs 1 coin and the one on top costs 2 coins.
You win the game by collecting the most coins, so the dilemma facing you is immediate and constant: Should I give up points to...do what? Score more points? Deny my opponent a valuable tile? Gain better positioning for future tile placements? You will face all of those questions, but in a simple, straightforward manner that doesn't wear out its welcome. Often you find the same tile on a 1-coin or 2-coin spot as in one of the free spots, so you can dismiss that dupe as a choice, while keeping in mind that you might be able to grab it next turn.
This latter bit is important because of what the tiles do:
• Pigs are worth 1 coin on their own when you drop them, but if the dropped tile is adjacent to a block of one or more pig tiles, then you also score 1 coin for each of those piggies — but only if those piggies are yours and not your opponent's. As in most fairy tales, ownership is incredibly important!
• Princesses work similarly, scoring 1 coin on their own while also giving you 1 coin for each of your princesses in a diagonal line from the newly dropped tile.
• Little Red Riding Hood scores 1 coin at game's end for each of your characters orthogonally adjacent to it. Pinocchio works similarly, but he scores for orthogonally adjacent opposing characters.
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• Big Bad Wolf scores 3 coins for you if you have more BBW in a row than the opponent. Thus, having two BBW in a row is meaningless unless the opponent has one.
• Evil Queen serves only as a blocker because if the opponent drops a character immediately on top of EQ, they must pay you 1 coin.
• Pied Piper and Jack (of beanstalk fame) work similarly, scoring 1 coin on their own and allowing you to drop a secondary token, respectively a rat tile in a separate column or a beanstalk tile in the same column on top of Jack. Rats and beanstalks aren't characters, so they don't trigger EQ, Pinocchio, and Little Red Riding Hood.
Some spots on the game board feature icons that give a bonus or penalty no matter which tile is played there. The X strips the power of the tile, although the tile can still be triggered by other tiles, such as a Princess seeing another Princess on an X space. Some spots give 1-2 coins when you occupy them, and two others allow you to pay 1 coin to take another action immediately.
Each action you take has an incremental effect on the board and the player standings. You gain 1 coin here, another coin there. You gain 1 coin, pay it to take another turn, then gain 1-2 more coins. The Big Bad Wolf sets up a potential payoff of 3 coins for one tile, but you often need to drop another tile or two in less than ideal spaces in order to ensure a payoff. Pigs and Princesses promise a potential bonanza, but your opponent typically restricts you to 2-3 coins at most.
With the short runway of tiles on display, you can't plan for more than a single turn, although that won't stop you from setting up "what if" scenarios just in case something ideal is drawn from the bag — but the cost of taking that ideal tile knocks 1-2 coins off the payout, so again you're advancing ever so slowly.
The rules are ambiguous about the Evil Queen, noting that "When your opponent drops another character directly above Evil Queen, they pay you [1 coin] if able." All of us read "directly above" as meaning "anywhere in the column above EQ", so the tax was a disincentive to play in the column, but you still did it sometimes to block the opponent and break even or gain a smidge. I've since clarified with CMON that you pay only when occupying the space immediately above EQ, which makes the power much worse — but maybe that's okay since not every tile has to have the same value in a drafting game.
Additionally, while I can appreciate the nuances of the rats and beanstalks not being characters, which means they won't trigger the Evil Queen or allow an opponent's Pinocchio to score off them, those tiny benefits don't seem enough to merit their non-character status, especially since these tiles do trigger the bonus spaces in the grid that earn you coins or allow you to buy an extra turn. Why add this wrinkle (and extra sentences to the rulebook) for almost no reason?
I've played Fairy Tale Inn seven times on a review copy from CMON, and the game seems ideal for a market that is unfortunately unlikely to ever discover it. The rules (PDF) are brief, and aside from the EQ wording and the quirk about rats and beanstalks not being characters, everything about the gameplay is straightforward. When you each take a turn and you gain 1 coin on the opponent, you get a little buzz of excitement — and when you don't, you say okay, the payoff is coming, hope staying with you regardless of whether it should or not.
The game ends as soon as a third column is filled on the game board, so players collectively control the pace of play, and unless you're calculating everything, the winner might be unclear since the points are split between coins on hand and the position of tiles on the board.
For more details on play, check out the video below:
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