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.
Friendly Fishing, a feather-light set collection game, was one of my most anticipated GenCon releases. This tiny box, from publisher GameHead and designers Bruno Faidutti and Alex Randolph, caught my interest with artist A. Giroux’s charming cover. It held my attention thanks to the magic of shared incentives.
The lake is populated with fish, each part of a set that scores in one way or another. On your turn, you move the crushingly adorable boat token to any adjacent spot with a fish and add that fish to your collection. If at any point you find that you cannot collect a fish on your turn, you return the boat to the center island and choose a new path. The game ends when the boat is well and truly out of options.
At that point, everyone scores up their fish, as you’d expect. What you may not expect, unless you’ve played the 2019 game Tonari on which this is based, is what puts the “Friendly” in Friendly Fishing: your final score is your own score plus the score of the person to your left.
Delightful. A tremendous idea, a clever way of inverting the usual dynamics of these games. Screwing over the player after you is second-nature, an assumed good. Not so in Friendly Fishing. In an ideal world, you’d score the most points and the player immediately after you would have the second-most.
In practice, it doesn’t quite work. I’m not one to shy away from a little math, but final scoring in Friendly Fishing is laborious and more confusing than you’d expect. Each player has to figure out their individual score. Once that’s done, you go back and calculate everyone’s final score. This is hardly nuclear physics, but it is cumbersome for what is, again, a feather-light set collection game. The variety of sets is such that it’s also hard to keep track of other players’ scores in situ, so it can be hard to play meaningfully. It says something that my favorite plays of this game were at 2 players, when the central hook is dropped entirely.
I’m not usually one to workshop games while reviewing them. I believe it is my place to regard the object as it is, not to suggest how it would be improved. In the case of Friendly Fishing, though, I do wonder if anyone involved in publishing this tried a ruleset in which your final score is determined not by combining individual player scores, but by treating your neighbor’s tokens as if they were part and parcel with your own? It does make a difference, both in terms of the final numbers and in terms of tracking.
I do, despite the low score, like Friendly Fishing. I really have enjoyed playing at 2, though even then the variety of fish and scoring rules can get a bit muddy. It’s a nice, breezy abstract with adorable window dressing. I’ll rarely take much issue with anything matching that description. But the central hook of a game cannot be a hindrance to player enjoyment. That’s the opposite of the idea. User-Friendly Fishing this ain’t.
Friendly Fishing details
- Designer: Alex Randolph, Bruno Faidutti
- Artists: A. Giroux
- Publishers: GameHead
- Release Date: 2026
- Player count : 2 - 5
- Age range : 10+
- Time range : 20 - 30 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Grid Movement, Neighbor Scope, Semi-Cooperative Game, Set Collection
- BGG Geek Rating: 6.77033 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
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