FORT (2020)

PLAYERS	TIME	DESIGNER	PUBLISHER
2-4	20-40 mins	Grant Rodiek	Leder Games

In this Deck Builder with a twist, we have a game all about kids hanging and playing.

Your deck is your friends, and you’ll spend the game making new ones and losing others who are fickle with friendship and get drawn to wandering off to other players.

In FORT you play friends and use their skills to gain you resources (pizza and toys) that help you upgrade your fort.

Your cards have two types of abilities on them; something you can do alone, and something that you can do, but other players can sacrifice a matching card to follow.

This makes the game quite thinky when you want to carry out certain moves, but you don’t want to help another player.

Of course you might end up helping them anyway when they get to pinch one of your cards. Because at the end of your turn, any of your friends that you didn’t play go and hang out in your yard (a sort of holding ground before the discard pile). From here, opponents could swipe them.

While this is a fantastic mechanic, and adds further thought to your turn over what you want to do versus what you don’t want to lose, it is the mechanic that plays different depending on player count.

A 2-player game will be more relaxing here as you know that you can only lose one out of the ones you place down. This isn’t too bad.

Go for a 4-player game though, and you could lose all of them before your next turn.

This inevitability means you might care less about your cards as it’s impossible to hold on to things.

Overall the game is tight with its limited resource tracks, constant rotation of your deck, and close race to the Fort ending.

One thing I do struggle with is the amount of icons. We still use the guide sheet and I still scratch my head and confuse some symbols for others and mess up my turn.

Overall, FORT is a beautiful game, with great components, and a nice twist on the genre. However, it’s a bit fiddly and can be quite frustrating at times.