FantasyForm: where you buy your opponents hit points

 While I have not yet gotten around to trying Spaceshipped, I did decide to give its spiritual sequel FantasyForm a try. Among other things, I figured the system would get an extra layer of refinement.

FantasyForm is an 18-Card micro game about being an alchemist whose ultimate goal is to kill your rival. (Let’s assume your rival is a bad guy, just for the sake of our peace of mind) The game is one part adventure game and two parts economic game.

I’m not going to go into details about the mechanics but the game gets by with eighteen cards by having each card able to be a resource, two different flavors of event, an item/companion and a price index. I’m no stranger to multi-use cards but that’s still a hefty amount of content for one piece of cardboard.

But the graphic design actually makes it easy to make sense of everything. Sid Sackson’s Venture is one of my gold standards for graphic design making a card work and FantasyForm hold up.

More than that, I am impressed by the flow of the game. The explore phase has you follow downward steps on a row of event cards. At the end of each exploration phase, the end card of each row becomes the first card of the next row.

I did have to watch a tutorial video to get over the initial learning curve. However, after two turns, everything clicked and I was rolling.

A goal of a lot of micro games is to fit a ‘big’ gaming experience in a small amount of components. And, as someone whose into PnP, I’ve looked at a lot of those. And it is easy for them to get cluttered and fiddly.

FantasyForm, between clean graphic design and clear flow of action, manages to be fairly intuitive. Once you know what’s going on, it makes sense and doesn’t feel fiddly. Honestly, I am impressed, not by how much game is crammed in, but by how playable it is.

A lot of the game actually comes down to money and market management. Buying magical essences low and selling them high. I find it hilarious that you hurt your rival by paying for the damage with the game’s currency. Mechanically, though, it makes sense and helps the game hold together.

Once I got past the initial learning bump, I found FantasyForm has a very natural rhythm. The game has a tempo that really adds to the experience.

I don’t know if I’ll try Spaceshipped. So many games, so little time. But FantasyForm makes me consider it.