Fourth Wing: Rise of the Wing Leader

Fourth Wing: Rise of the Wing Leader is a very light strategy game based on the popular fantasy book series Fourth Wing. Full disclosure, none of us had heard of the books beforehand, but I’ve since bought the first audiobook and plan to listen to it as soon as I finish making my way through Dungeon Crawler Carl. And honestly, the sooner we can get a game set in that universe, the better… but I digress.

The game starts with everyone selecting a dragon meeple and placing it on the starting space. Essentially, you’re trying to make your way around the edge of the board. The way you do that is by winning hands, which then give you the ability to move a certain number of spaces around the board.

You start with a selection of cards in your hand and an extra card placed in front of you. On the board there are four different sections, one for each colour, green, red, blue and black. In each of those sections are tokens that allow you to do things such as move a certain number of spaces, gain your special Signet power, or gain an extra card.

Your hand is made up of character cards that have either two or three symbols attached to them in any permutation of the four colours. They can all be different colours, or a card can have all of the same colour on it.

When the round starts, you go around the table beginning with the first player, who gets an amazing metal-cast bookmark first-player token, which I suspect fans of Fourth Wing are going to want the game for just to get hold of. On your turn, you can either play two two-icon character cards, giving you four icons in total, or one three-icon character card. This gives you a certain number of icons and a particular mix of colours.

Play continues around the table until everyone has played their cards and you can see how everyone is doing. When it comes back to you, you can choose to check out and take any of the tokens that you are currently winning. However, doing so puts you out of the round. Alternatively, if you’re not winning, or if you want to push your luck even further, you can play another card to raise, much like in poker, in an attempt to secure additional rewards. You can also choose to fold. At first, I didn’t really understand why you would want to do that, but it quickly became apparent that saving cards for future rounds is incredibly important, especially if you’re trying to set yourself up for those valuable three-space movements.

What really surprised me was just how well this system works. The strategy of deciding when to keep pushing, when to fold, and even when to deliberately step aside and let two other players get locked into a bidding war is genuinely compelling and a lot of fun. It’s a very light game, but it constantly gives you those little moments where you feel clever. Sometimes that’s preserving cards for later rounds, sometimes it’s timing your exit perfectly, and sometimes it’s recognising that someone else is about to overcommit and simply getting out of their way.

You go back and forth until everyone has either checked out or folded. Using the tokens you’ve collected, you then move around the board, the first-player token is passed on, and everything starts again. There are also special powers called Signets that you can unlock, giving you unique abilities to manipulate the game in your favour.

It’s a really simple game that has obviously been designed to appeal to fans of the book series, but we genuinely really enjoyed it. It’s not something we usually play, it’s essentially a straightforward bidding and push-your-luck card game with some light strategic elements, but it works really well. You can play this with anyone, regardless of their knowledge of the books or even their level of board gaming experience. It’s incredibly approachable.

The first-player marker is genuinely high quality, and the box and overall presentation are lovely.

This was one of the first games we played at the UK Games Expo. At that point, I had decided I wasn’t going to spend any money, and I really regret not going back to pick up a pre-release copy before we left. Hopefully, I’ll be able to grab a retail copy soon and give it another playthrough, because I really enjoyed it. As I said, it’s even got me thinking about reading the book series.

The game is due to release in mid-July and will be exclusive to Waterstones until September. I know this will bother some, but anything we can do to get more eyes on our hobby in mainstream shops can only be a good thing.

Wonderful stuff.