Matthew BaileyWe’ve played some excellent games over the last few weeks, and Easter was really good, and the overall quality has been high, so we were really excited to finally sit down and play Fort, from Leder Games, most known for Root and more recently Arcs.
Fort is a deck-building engine management game where you are trying to build the best fort and get the best friends to come and help you build that fort, make it better, and gain victory points. It’s quite an unusual concept and theme, but it’s quite appealing. The artwork is really nice, as with all of the games in this kind of series, but unfortunately, I think I probably went in with slightly high expectations and left a tiny bit disappointed. Let me explain.
To start, each player has their own player board (which represents your fort), markers, and a deck of cards made up of your 2 best friend cards and 8 more cards randomly drawn from the deck. You can also draft, but the game says to draw randomly with kids, so that is what we did. The key issue here, unlike most other deck-builders, is that everyone’s starting deck can be vastly different and unbalanced. You then pick a hand of five cards ready for your first round. In the centre of the table there is the Park, which is a row of face-up cards that players can recruit, along with shared supplies of pizza and toy tokens.
The game is played over a series of turns. Each turn has five phases: Cleanup, Play, Recruit, Discard, and Draw. Cleanup is skipped on the first turn. On later turns, any cards currently in your Yard are moved to your discard pile.
You start your turn by choosing one card from your hand and playing it. Every card has a public action and a private action. The player may use one or both actions, in either order. Some actions can be improved by adding extra cards from hand that match the required suit, or by using matching suits stored in the Lookout area of the player board. One of the really cool things about this is that after the active player resolves their card, the other players may follow the public action. To do this they discard one card from their hand with a matching suit. If they do, they perform the same public action shown on the played card. This is a great idea as it gives you things to do between rounds and, oddly, unlike most deck-builders, if you can find ways to have fewer cards in your hand, potentially the better.
The next phase is Recruit. Here you MUST gain one new card. This can be done by taking a face-up card from the Park, drawing the top card from the Park deck, or taking a card from another player’s Yard. If a card is taken from the Park, it is immediately replaced with a new one from the deck. Unlike most games where you have a currency and have to buy cards, here you immediately get a new card always, which felt like there was little element of choice or planning, and I often felt like I had no good options, with my deck feeling bloated rather than more powerful as the game went on, which isn’t an ideal place to be in… and here comes the main issue I have with the game, is that I never felt like I was doing anything cool or exciting, and pretty much everything in this game felt like admin and busy work to just waste my turns looking for the handful of good cards in my reasonably bloated deck as I crept towards the game’s end.
During the Discard phase, all cards played that turn, along with any added cards, are discarded. Any unused cards left in hand are placed face up into the player’s Yard. These cards remain there until that player’s next Cleanup phase, and can be stolen by other players.
The final phase is Draw. The player draws five new cards from their deck. If their deck is empty, they shuffle their discard pile to create a new deck and continue drawing.
Throughout the game, players gain pizza and toy resources. These can be spent to increase your fort level. A higher fort level increases storage space on the player board and is also worth points at the end of the game. Reaching certain fort levels also grants bonus cards.
The game ends when any one of three conditions is met: a player reaches 25 points, a player reaches fort level 5, or the Park deck runs out. The current round is then completed so all players have taken the same number of turns. Players then total points from their score marker, fort level, bonus cards, and any special rewards. The highest score wins.
I didn’t hate it, but equally I never really felt I was enjoying myself in both of the games I have played (I usually try and play a game at least 3 times, but I really didn’t want to). You spend a lot of time doing busy work and never really felt like anything overly got going. Yes, it definitely changes the normal formula that you usually get with deck-building games, with there being more player interaction and the fact you can steal cards, which is kind of cool, but you just kind of feel like you’re doing the same thing. It almost feels more like you’re playing something like Splendor, but without the sort of engine-building, and the fact that you only ever claim one card per turn means you never get a chance to lay everything out and come up with these really big swinging combos that you would normally expect in this kind of game.
Component-wise, however, the game is great. It comes in a really small box, which is lovely, and definitely feels like a larger, weightier box than it is. The artwork is really nice, the boards are really good, and the tokens are really good as well. Absolutely no qualms there, it’s a quality product and it also looks great on the shelf.
This game’s definitely got its benefits and I can see why some people do like it, as there’s stuff here to like and there’s some interesting things here as well, but for us it fell a little flat. Neither Jack nor Toby had any interest in playing it a second time, and I forced myself through a second game and, if I’m being honest, I didn’t really want to play again afterwards, especially not when there are some other fantastic deck-builders out there, some of which we’ve reviewed fairly recently which is a shame as I really wanted to like this.
