Featherweight Fiesta Game Review

During a meeting with our friend Rawan from publisher Gigamic at SPIEL 2022, she showed me a mockup of a game coming soon now known as Featherweight Fiesta. It had the look of a dexterity game for families: take paper birds and try to balance them on a telephone line made of string, pulled across three wooden telephone poles that straddle the two halves of the box.

It was cute. I couldn’t tell how much game there was, but I liked the idea of being able to match order fulfillment cards with paper birds. If you knocked any birds off the wire by accident, other players were rewarded with items that provided points at the end of the game.

When we met with Rawan at the SPIEL 2023 show, Featherweight Fiesta was complete—she handed me a copy. My two kids (ages seven and nine) joined me for a few runs at the game, an easy task since the game takes about 15 minutes to play.

As a game, it’s OK. As a toy, it’s much better. But that leaves its chances of staying in the collection a bit slim. My kids are just old enough to appreciate a fun toy, but after they played it twice and I played it one more time with my wife, everyone else shrugged their shoulders and moved on to the next activity.

Featherweight is Right

That means that Featherweight Fiesta—and yes, I gave you all the rules in that last section!—is light fare, and likely a perfect fit for a six-year-old and their parents, especially if most of them have good hands.

I love the look of the game on the table, and setup is a breeze. This is one of those games where you can punch the egg tokens, string the telephone wire, and deal out the order matching cards while another person reads the rules to the table, and you’ll be ready to go in about 10 minutes. Putting new birds on the wire is a very minor dexterity challenge. We almost never knocked birds over, which maybe is a testament to steady hands but I think is also a testament to accessible game design. You’ll have a fumble here and there, but nothing we would call game-breaking.

After the draw deck runs out, the main phase of the game ends. Afterwards, all players get to pull on the telephone wire to try and shake off the birds in one of the four wire sections in the hopes that this pull will leave only one bird standing.

If so, that player gets to fill an additional order card. This phase is not thrilling—in a bit of a surprise, my kids liked this part of the game the least—but it makes clean-up fun because we found that this process usually ejects all of the remaining birds back into the box.

Featherweight Fiesta exists as a game for young families looking for something a little different. It wasn’t memorable, but it was pretty. Sometimes, the best art knows its place in the world.