Fluffy Pede

Fluffy Pede – A fun, a simple on first glance game that has amazing depth due to the amount of board manipulation you can do.



The first game I’m going to be talking about that I played at the UK Games Expo, and really enjoyed, was Fluffy Pede. The reason we’re going with Fluffy Pede first is simply that the game is on Gamefound, and the campaign ends in about a week’s time. Once I found this out, I wanted to make sure I got my thoughts on the game up as quickly as possible to try and give the developers at Shy Finn Games as much benefit from this review as I could.

Fluffy Pede is quite an unusual order-fulfilment, board-manipulation card game that all three of us really enjoyed playing. It’s a pretty simple game to understand, but the depth of what you can do by manipulating the play area is what makes this game something special. Even though we only got to play it once at the Expo, it was one of the games that I came away thinking about most at the end of the weekend.

In Fluffy Pede, you are creating plush Fluffypedes by adding Parts cards to one of three active orders. Each Fluffypede has specific requirements shown on its Head card, including the types and number of parts it can contain, which is determined by a die.

On your turn, you play a Parts card from the chosen side up onto a Fluffypede and then draw a new card. What you are trying to do is work towards fulfilling that order by getting the right number of the right coloured fluffy beads. However, you don’t necessarily want to push things too far because, when a Fluffypede contains exactly the required number of parts, it is completed. If you played the final card, you take all of the cards used to build it for scoring, then a new Head card is revealed to start a fresh order.

This is a really fun mechanic because you’re constantly trying to add cards and improve what you’ve got without getting too close, as you don’t want your opponent to be the one who gets to play the final card and collect all the points.

What is really key here, though, and what makes this stand out as something very unique and special, is the amount of manipulation available within the play area. Quite often, games like this involve laying cards to complete orders and that’s pretty much how they work. Here, however, there are lots of other abilities and powers available to you that can completely change how the game plays out.

First and foremost, as you lay cards, you gain spools of cotton as tokens, and these can be used to activate player abilities. These abilities are different for every player and can do things such as allowing you to draw specific cards and choose which ones to keep. There are also powers on the cards themselves, such as the ability to re-roll one of the dice or switch cards around, including the starter cards.

This means you could spend several turns building up a collection of cards that perfectly matches one order, only for somebody to swap the columns around or re-roll a die and completely change the requirements. It means there are a lot of tactical decisions to make regarding where and when you place your cards.

What’s great, though, is that it doesn’t have to be played at that level of cerebral complexity. In reality, you can simply focus on completing sets and not worry too much about the deeper layer of manipulation. This makes it a game that is approachable for a wide range of ages and experience levels.

The game ends when either the Head deck or the Parts deck runs out. The player who has collected the most cards from completed Fluffypedes wins.

Obviously, I can’t comment on the final components as this was a prototype copy we were playing. The cardstock was nice, the artwork is lovely, and everything has such a wonderful pastel feel to it that really stands out. Pastel colours aren’t used particularly often in board games, and this immediately caught my attention. In fact, I spotted the game from the other side of the hall and knew we had to go over and see what it was.

The combination of really lovely artwork, a really solid game, and gameplay that is quite simple on the surface but reveals much more complexity through the sheer amount of board manipulation available means that Fluffy Pede is an excellent card game that I cannot recommend more strongly. It was absolutely one of the highlights of the UK Games Expo for me, and I really hope more people get the chance to check it out.

Gamefound Link – https://gamefound.com/en/projects/shy-finn-games/centipede