Fungi, a game designed of Brent Povis, is a two-player card game that involves collecting and cooking a variety of mushrooms for a delicious meal one woodland evening. The play time is once familiar between 20 and 30 minutes but while getting used to the slightly convoluted rules and the less than quick to run through rules booklet up to 40 minutes. I can recommend while the rules may initially seem a little opaque on paper once you have played the game through its sense of progress turn by turn will win you over. The short run time make the game a good opener or early session gap filler, but the surprisingly large play space required make it a poor choice on the move but great when you arrive.
The components
The box is a standard 13cm by 18cm decked out in some charming thematic art. It contains the 120 cards that make up the game and rules documents in English and German. The deck of cards is split into groups including 86 Forest Cards (which contains the mechanical components of the game; mushrooms, pans, baskets, flavour enhancers and moons), 8 Night Cards (containing improved versions of the forest deck’s mushrooms), 18 Sticks (useful for accessing more distant mushrooms), a pair of shoes (denoting the immediately accessible cards) and six Overview Cards which will help you keep track of the sets of card in the game and the action available (and a blank) .
How to play
At its heart Fungi is a set collection game, the goal is to collect a hand of mushroom cards from the forest and then score them by cooking them in pans in front to f you with ingredient cards to add a addition points. Different mushrooms have different numbers of cards in their set and different values for the “flavour” that is the method of scoring.
You start with a pan in front of you and a small hand of three cards. Additional cards can be drawn from the forest made up of eight cards, either without cost from in front of your feet or from further away by spending stick cards.
Once a turn has been completed a card sent to a “decay” pile area and the forest is replenished up to eight from the draw pile with the already exposed car being slid down toward the feet marker.
On you turn you can draw from the forest, take the compost heap, trade cards from your hands for sticks, place a pan down in front of you ready for mushrooms, or place mushrooms from you hands as sets of 3 or more in one of your empty pans. That is 5 possible actions however the forest pushing a card into the decay pile each turn and the decay pile being discarded once it hit exceeds four cards, sets a pace that means it is very possible to miss cards that you need for your sets.
The hand limit of eight is very tight, with the numbers of cards needed from a set being very high if you want to include the ingredient bonus card in their pan of mushrooms. With a set of four or more for butter and cider requiring sets of five or more. This is somewhat alleviated if you can get your hands on one of the baskets that seem to have been left haphazardly on the forest floor, each adding to your hand limit and giving you the chance to go for that high scoring pan.
Learning when to sell loose pairs on mushrooms for sticks so that you can get ahead of an opponent is one of the trickier tactics to master, but one worth knowing.
Once the forest is empty that is the end of the game. The depleted draw pile signalling the very crunchy last few turns where players try to eke out as many remaining points from their hands before that last card hits their hands or the decay pile. Once the draw pile is emptied and the forest floor depleted, each player tallies up their points from their pans and the one with the highest amount wins.
Summary
The game is pretty with the vibrant artwork making the mushroom sets easy to pick out even if you are not familiar with the names. The card quality is good and once you finish the game the whole lot scoops up quickly as the clearly recognisable card backs make organising for a quick set up on you next session very easy. It’s a neat game that pack into a pretty box.
Playing the game is fun, but if you have problems positioning cards, the constant sliding down of the forest floor card during the clear-up phase of the turn may get you down. Tactics wise there are several approaches available from the dragster race to the set denial, even touch of the turn control. It is a game that can be played very technically with an eye on card and set counting or in a relaxed trawl through some beautifully themed art.
To sum up: If you like a game that is a sedate wander through a forest ending in sudden plummet off a cliff, then this is the game for you. I would thoroughly recommend.
