Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Any chance to play a new Friedemann Friese game is a chance I’m willing to take.
The designer, best known for titles such as Power Grid, Findorff, Faiyum, and last year’s Fishing, has released a new trick-taker called Fearless through his publishing arm, 2-F Spiele. I picked up a copy of Fearless at SPIEL Essen 2025, and recently got the game to the table for a couple plays.
Fearless uses a standard trick-taker ruleset—players must follow the suit led to begin a new trick, and the highest number in the trick wins. There is no trump, and if players don’t have a card in the led suit, they can throw off with any card they would like. But then, the rules get funny—because the cards range in value from negative six to positive six, sometimes the highest card is a negative number. And, the current score of each trick is announced as new cards are played, including cards that are not in suit.
That means in a four-player game, Gideon might lead a trick with a positive four in the blue suit. I follow, in blue, with a negative two. Now, the value of the trick is positive two. Rex plays a negative three, so now the trick value is negative one. Joseph plays a positive three, so the trick ends with a value of positive two.
Gideon played the highest card in that trick (a positive four), so he takes the trick. Scores in Fearless are tracked with a very simple set of score cards that go in both positive and negative directions, and when a round is over, players don’t track whether they ended with a positive or a negative result…just the raw number where their score tracker ends the round.
That means whether you end the round with a positive 12 or a negative 12, the only score written down is 12. And after a number of rounds equal to the number of players, the player with the lowest score wins, similar to how games like Rebel Princess Deluxe Edition work (a game that is itself based on Hearts, where the lowest score wins).
So, as a big fan of Hearts, I enjoyed Fearless. The main issue blocking that joy was tied to two main areas. The overall playtime here is a bit long, especially at four or five players. Because of the math involved and the need to constantly update scores after—yes—every single trick. Fearless can turn into a long sit thanks to the math.
The second issue may have just been the luck of the draw across my plays, but I wonder if that would surface every time I got Fearless to the table. Because of the play format, a player really wants to win only one or two tricks in each round, but they can’t win by winning zero. That’s because a player is penalized 15 points if they don’t win any of the tricks in a round.
On the one hand, I love this wrinkle. With some games like this, going “nil” is a fun thing to achieve, and doing that in Fearless is much harder because of the swing in card values.
On the other hand, we found that it was often difficult to win a single trick and then give control back to another player, especially late in a round. Being short-suited here can be brutal, and led to some massive scoring rounds (remember, scoring is bad!) where players found themselves with 20- or 30-point scores in a round and an inability to find their way back into the competition. (This is especially true if you decide to try Fearless with only three players.)
For experienced card players, I think Fearless is worth a look. Rebel Princess achieves much of what I like out of games like Fearless, with better production, wild rules each round, and a shorter playtime regardless of player count. But watching players try to “rubber band” their way back and forth on the score track to end the round with low scores ends up being entertaining…at least, for the player doing the rubber banding.
I certainly enjoyed Fearless more than Fishing. Fishing was more chaotic, and I thought its back half always overstayed its welcome. When considering that two of Friese’s most recent designs are trick-taking card games, Fearless makes clear that we’ll be getting more trick-taking games from Friese and 2-F Spiele in the near term. I’m excited to see what he gives us next.
