Recently, while playing a different game, a player at the table referred to the game being played as “simulating strategy.” I found this to be a lovely little comment, and now I’m going to pretend I said it.
Fountains is a game that simulates interaction. Beyond that critique, it’s a perfectly serviceable addition to the “draft stuff and add it to your personal player area and score points” genre. Plus, it looks pretty.
“Take and make”
Fountains bills itself as a “take and make” game, which I’ve heard a few times before. The term “drafting” apparently is in need of a rebrand, because that’s what this is. There are three colored pawns on a rondel-like circle board, and each turn, you move one of the pawns 1-3 spaces, skipping and not counting spaces occupied by another pawn. Then, you take a tile from the adjacent space and add it to your player area. After that, if you landed on a colored scoring space with the same-colored pawn, scoring occurs. There is also a single space where you draft bonus tiles that can be added to your personal fountain puzzle.
I’ll come back to the personal board in a moment, but let’s talk about that “simulated interaction.” Just know for now that you’re going to be making various patterns and configurations to score. When a scoring is triggered, all players score their boards. The blue scoring has you counting pools and is ranked, so players with more pools get more points. The white scoring has you choosing a single type of fish and all players score points for that type. Finally, the green scoring has you scoring groups of lily pads.
Now, with two players, there’s some interaction here—you can choose to skip scoring spaces that benefit you minimally, forcing your opponent to take control of the pawn and score for themselves, maybe taking a tile they don’t want. However, with any other player count, scoring is just lost in a random sauce of turn order binding and kingmaking decisions. Ultimately, it seems to me in a multiplayer game, you should just score when you’re getting a non-trivial amount of points and ignore how many points other players are getting. You have no means to control when one of the other 4 (game can play 5) players are going to opt to score unless you’re willing to engage in an extremely dense and ultimately fruitless min-maxing exercise. This is what I mean by simulated interaction. The game seems like it’s interactive, but ultimately it’s more driven by extremely difficult and uninteresting to predict player decisions. Just like in Planet Unknown, this is unnecessary, and ultimately empty interaction.
The puzzle
That said, the puzzle is interesting and challenging. Timing the placement of the pawns with the tiles you want to get is fun. The fountain pieces that you build your fountain out of are interesting shapes, and you have to place them in a way that evokes a multi-tiered fountain. They’re made of foam core, and the game incorporates a level system into placement and scoring. Different fountain pieces have jets, and you need to make sure that there are open channels from jets to various parts of your fountain on the same level and heading into levels below, or the unchanneled areas can’t score.
It’s reminiscent of Castles of Mad King Ludwig’s bizarro layouts, where you’re making oddly-shaped pieces fit together into something that scores points. You also can customize your scoring by taking bonus tokens and socketing them into areas of your fountain. I enjoyed my plays of Fountains, but ultimately, it is one of many solo tile-laying puzzles that the gaming market is saturated with, and they all start to blend together. But if you like baroque-looking fountains and figuring out tile configurations, this is one you’ll likely enjoy.
Fountains details
- Designer: Kedric Winks
- Artists: Shaun Ellis
- Publishers: The Op Games
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 1 - 5
- Age range : 10+
- Time range : 30 - 45 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Open Drafting, Rondel, Tile Placement
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.69244 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about Fountains.
