Fearless

• Designer: Friedemann Friese
• Publisher: 2F
• Players: 3-5
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In Fearless, you walk through a gloomy forest and try to stay on the safe path. If you still wander astray, you try to turn back again as close as possible. The closer you are to the safe path, the less fear you will suffer. Not walking at all is no alternative as you’ll remain behind on your own in the scary ruin. If you are the most fearless after several rounds, you will win the game!

Fearless is a simple trick-taking game with four suits and without trump. The card with the highest value in the led suit always wins the trick. The unusual part of the game is the card values as they are not all positive as typical for trick-taking games, but have values from +6 to -6 in each suit. Thus, you collect both negative and positive cards. The kicker: You try to gain a balanced score, collecting both minus and plus points. This is theoretically possible for all players, but “sadly” you play against each other — and the others are always pleased when they can scare you with another handful of points.

Setup the scare track so that you have the 6 cards in a row, making a path from -30 to 30.  Each player takes one ghost in front of them to remind them of their color and places the matching colored ghost on the scary ruin.  The deck of cards is set up for the correct player count; there will be cards from -6 to -1 as well as +1 to +6 in each of four suits.  There are also four zero cards (which have all four colors on them). The deck is shuffled and players are dealt out a hand of cards.

A start player is chosen (and will rotate with each hand).  The lead player can play any card to start the trick.  The color of this first card determines the lead suit for the hand.  All other players must follow this lead suit if possible when playing a card.  If it is a zero, the next player can play any card, and once a colored card is played, that determines the lead suit.  As each card is played, the player should announce the running sum of all the cards in the trick.  Each player plays one card to the trick and then it is resolved.

The player who played the highest card of the lead suit will win the trick.  If there are multiple cards tied for the highest lead card, the one played earlier will win the trick.  The winning player moves their ghost a number of spaces equal to the value of the trick they won (in the respective positive or negative direction).  As you keep all your won cards in front of you, you can also double check your position at the end of the hand by summing all those cards up again.

The winner of the trick then leads a card to start the next trick.  Continue until all the cards are played.  Players now score points based on the absolute value of the space they ended the round on.  Note that the scary ruin where players start has a 15 on it, so if you don’t take any tricks, you’ll score 15 points for the round.

After one round per player, the winner is the player with the lowest score.  There is no tie breaker.

My thoughts on the game

Fearless is a “trick taking” game that really plays out differently than most other games of that ilk.  Here, you are trying to balance out the tricks that you win so that you stay as close to the center of the track as possible.  Of course, your opponents all know this, and they will do whatever they can to get you off track, especially when it appears that you are going to win a trick. You can’t try to duck all the tricks in the game though – because if you don’t take a single trick, you end up with a 15 point penalty – and that’s pretty huge in this game. 

As the suits are fairly symmetrical, early tricks tend to be closer to zero (though not always!) than later tricks.  As players become void in suits, the possibility for wild swings in trick value definitely increases…  If you’re lucky enough to get a zero, you need to make sure that you find a good time to play it!  While it doesn’t change the value of the trick – as it follows any lead card, you could be forced to play it onto a trick, and it could possibly win an extremely negative trick!

While there really is no arc here – each round plays out exactly the same as the one before it, you really do need to play one round per player just to have enough tricks in the full game for players to be able to win some (and then have time to rectify bad scoring situations).  With only 12 or 13 tricks in a single hand, it’s really not enough to have that feel like a full game…

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Derek J
• I like it. Dale Y, Steph H
• Neutral.
• Not for me…