Rarely, I come across a game whose aesthetics overpower my critical sense. Fabled: The Spirit Lands is one of those games. It also makes moving up tracks not look and feel like moving up tracks, which is high praise from a curmudgeon like myself.
Bookington Bear
The object of Fabled: The Spirit Lands is to collect the most red books by the time the game ends. There are several scenarios that alter this formula, but ultimately, it’s a Knizian affair, where if there’s a tie for the red books, you go to the green books, then the blue books, and finally the crummy yellow books.
You can think of the books as cubes of four colors, and what you’re doing throughout most of the game is turning the books from one color to another color. It’s resource conversion at its most basic–two yellow books become a blue, two blues become a green, and two greens become a red.
The game operates with a simple formula, but it has some interesting quirks. Let’s talk tracks.
Take a hike
The game doesn’t call the map cards tracks, but tracks are what you have to work with as a player, so I’m going with it. At the beginning of the game, each player purchases a map card to add to the display, which is a line of adjacent cards. Whenever a new card gets added it can essentially be slipped in anywhere. The prairie map and the forest map have a single track on each card, while the mountain has two, but one of those two is always a dead end. Whenever a player takes an action to add a new card, they add a wizard piece to the start of each of the tracks. Each of the tracks/cards is slightly different, with prairies having the least powerful locations to visit, and forests having the most. They also have entrances and exits that can be games, so your little wizard pilgrims can move from one card to another if there’s a connection.
I keep insisting on calling them tracks because like many track-centric eurogames, when you get to certain points on the tracks, you get cool bonus actions that help you do the process of resource conversion more efficiently.
The game moves at a fast clip. First, the active player does a smaller action, moving one of their pieces one space, doing a conversion, adding a new card to the line, or just taking two yellow books. Then, they select a single terrain card type (mountain, forest, prairie) and they move all of their pieces 2 mandatory spaces on those cards, and every other player moves their pieces 1 on those cards.
It’s not highly strategic. Sometimes you’ll want to wait for somebody else to move your pieces, but there aren’t any first-come-first-served bonuses, so it’s mostly about comboing yourself without setting up other players too much, but everything moves forward at a leisurely pace. On top of this, when a card has no wizards on its tracks at the end of a turn, it’s removed, which can shift the landscape of the map.
Now, that’s all fine, but there are also scenarios that add events that change things up, and all the scenarios give players regular infusions of “ally cards” which basically give players one-time or passive abilities to assist in their wizard-ant-marching.
All-in-all, it’s serviceable, with no major glaring problems. But, I mentioned up top the art.
Heroes of Spirits and Magic
Fabled: The Spirit Lands is very much channeling the visual aesthetic of Heroes of Might and Magic III, a video game from 1999 that is popularly beloved. I was ten years old when the game came out, and I spent a lot of time playing it with a friend hotseat on his computer. There’s just something very familiar and nostalgic about the isometric art style of Fabled: The Spirit Lands, and it scratches a deep primal itch within me. So much so that the art style alone elevates the game past its very simplistic resource conversion mechanics. So, yeah, bonus point-five star for that.
But, if you’re not me, and don’t have angels fighting unicorns on the brain, you can do a lot worse for track navigation euros than Fabled: The Spirit Lands.
