First Impressions: Fuchs and Fertig

The point of going to Games Expo, other than to film videos with big name celebs is to play games with interesting people. This series of First Impressions will be covering the games that I played for the first time at Expo.

We’ll be starting with Fuchs and Fertig and covering Tea Time, The Downfall of Pompeii, Ice Flow, Small World and Tigris and Euphrates The Card Game.

The exceptionally nice Kevin O’Sullivan from the excellent Kevin and Games, insisted that we play Fuch and Fertig, a game published by Zoch Verlag.

The concept is simple, on your turn you decide if the next card in your stack of twelve cards is going to be higher, lower or the same as the card in the centre of the table. If you’re right you can go again or you can stick, handing in any cards you’ve turned over. If you are wrong you place all the cards you turned over at the bottom of your deck. The first player to get rid of all their cards wins.

Now the game could have easily used numbers, but instead it went for animals, ranging from the tiny ant to the huge brown bear.The artwork is delightful and would definitely appeal to young and old gamers alike.

The push your luck element of the game is very appealing to me. I’ve always been a bit of a risk taker in games, often taking a gamble which seems ridiculous to all the other players, given the odds. But for me that’s where the fun lies, the more ridiculous the odds, the bigger the stakes, the more enjoyable the payoff if it works out.

This element combined with the memory aspect of Fuchs and Fertig as you try to remember how many cards you’ve played and what order the cards are in on the bottom of your deck makes this a fast playing and fun game.

We played twice on the Friday and both games lasted probably less than ten minutes. I’d have happily played several more times but the magpie gamers were looking at other shiny things and had fluttered away.

In short, my first impressions of the game were that its a simple fun little filler that really could be played anytime, anywhere and with anyone.Certainly not a full-evening-style game but one you could easily play to pass the time waiting in line at a convention or at an airport.