Fixer

• Designer: Takaaki Iida
• Publisher: Jelly Jelly
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 15 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In this competitive trick taker, players utilize the four suits to become the ultimate shadow ruler.  The regime controls the capital, the capital controls the media, the media controls the people, the people overthrow the regime…  Each suit features one weak and one strong match-up. Players take turns placing cards into areas. Players must follow suit in an arena if able. As soon as an area has two cards, conflict resolution occurs!  The winner gets one of the three victory point tokens and takes their opponent’s card as points. However, the losing player can choose to take the stronger card into their hand! Once no victory point tokens remain, the game is over! Do you have what it takes to overcome all the odds and become the FIXER?

The deck is made up of four suits of 9 cards each, numbered 1-9. The suits have a circular power arrangement with one suit they dominate and one suit they are dominated by. There are boards which are placed on the table and the spots on each are filled with conflict markers.  They are set up so that there is a board between each player and their neighbor; in a 4p game there is also a central board.

The deck is shuffled and is dealt out fully. Players can play cards into the areas on the board that face them.  You can only play to a board which has conflict markers still on it.  If someone has already played a card to a board, you must follow suit if possible. If you are the first to play there, you can play any card you like.

If an area has 2 cards, there is a conflict and it is immediately resolved.  The process of resolution depends on the suits of the cards played:

• Same suit – the higher numbered card wins (this is a normal win)
• Suits with dominance – the card of the dominant suit wins regardless of number – this is called a critical win.
• Suits without dominance – the earlier card played wins, regardless of number – this is also a normal win

The winner takes the losing card and places it in their scoring area. The winner also takes one of the conflict markers from that area and places it on top of the card they took.  In a normal victory, both are face down.  In a critical victory, both the card and the chit are face up – this happens when you win by playing a card of the dominant suit over your opponents cards.  The loser usually adds their opponent’s card to their hand – unless they already have a face up card of that color in their scoring area (from a previous critical win); in this case, their opponent’s card is discarded.

The game continues until all conflict markers are removed from the game. At this time, players calculate their scores – by adding up the values of all the cards they captured this game plus values on any face up conflict markers.  Cards in your hand and facedown conflict markers have no value.  The player with the highest score wins.

There are some variants included in the rules for advanced play but I haven’t tried them yet.

My thoughts on the game

Fixer is a trick taking game that has you essentially play three different 1v1 duels (one with each other opponent) while managing a single hand of cards.  You’ll have to try to play your cards wisely, choosing which battles to engage in and which to try to get a benefit out of while you are losing.

The way that you end up taking the opponent’s winning card into your hand does give you a nice way to improve your hand for a later turn.  Interestingly, a critical victory gives you two cards as a benefit for winning, but this in turn eliminates your ability to take cards in that color for the rest of the game.  

When you end up losing a trick, you’ll want to play as low a card as possible so that your opponent gets a limited number of victory points from your card.  You might even want to wait until you are able to play your high valued cards or cards of the same suit elsewhere to give yourself better options in a particular trick.

The rules are quite confusing concerning critical wins?  Page 8 tells you how critical victories work then point in FAQ on page 14 gives opposite ruling?

We asked the publisher, and we got the following explanation:

“You’re not the first person to be caught off guard by the FAQ – we might have to edit how we explain this edge case… To explain: Normally, a critical victory results from the second player playing a card into an arena. For example, there is a blue card in the arena already. I have no blue cards in my hand, so it’s in my best interest to play a yellow card, thus achieving critical victory. I take the blue card face up to indicate that I do not have any blue cards in my hand. 

The FAQ mentions an edge case where the second player causes a critical victory for the first player – you basically never want this to happen. Re-using the example above; there is a blue card in an arena. I have no blue cards in my hand, so I can play any suit. I choose to play a red card, thus causing my opponent to win via a critical victory. However, when they take my red card from the arena, none of the players know whether the critical winner has any red cards remaining in their hand, so they place the card face down instead. As this is an intentional act of increasing your opponent’s score, it’s a very rare edge case that likely won’t come up in any game (we’ve not seen it happen ourselves).”

Obviously, we’ve never seen this happen either – but this did trip us up when learning the game as we weren’t quite sure what the rule was trying to tell us.

As the game progresses, you will have fewer options on where to play cards, so you’ll want to have crafted your hand of cards into the ones you want.  You are limited to only playing cards where there are markers left.   Fixer brings some interesting ideas to the table, though it does feel that the game plays you at times and it’s worth a look if you’re wanting a trick taker with a different feel to it..

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Dan B. (2 plays): I have played this both with four and three and think it works a lot better with three: with four it’s quite possible for one player to be forced to almost always play first to their tricks, which is a huge disadvantage. With three this seemed much less likely, though it might still be possible – I didn’t analyze it in detail. I’d play again with three but not four.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor