A cozy and cutthroat duel?

Perfectly fitting the current season, let’s take a look at another beautiful SPIEL release: 🍂Fall! 😍

If I had to describe it in the fastest way I’d probably say it is a bit like a duel version of Cascadia 🤔 - but of course there are many little tweaks and changes that differentiate the two games! 😉 The reason it seems so similar is because players are drafting pairs of tiles and tokens: hexagonal tiles that are used to expand a forest, and circular tokens that can go on top of certain tiles. But let’s take a closer look at what makes Fall a unique experience!

👉Most notably, you are both working on the same forest, so tiles and tokens are played into a shared ecosystem. Tiles can have one or more of 3 colors, which is important for the main placement rule. They also have symbols in the middle showing whether birds, mushrooms or foxes are allowed to go on top. There are also ⅓ flowers on the edges; correctly putting 3 such tiles next to each other will make a complete flower. 🌸

You aren’t just randomly laying out tiles and tokens of course, instead both of you get 3 scoring cards - 🧐 one of which determines the values of flowers, one is a special bird scoring and one for foxes. There are 6 of each scoring card type, so you won’t know for sure what the opponent has, but you can also try to deduce this from the way they are playing.

A very interesting mechanism is that you can build on top of existing tiles up to a height of 3 at any time - you can just conveniently remove the previously placed token (except if it’s a toad or a mushroom) and this makes all the difference! You see, you can just really get into the way of your opponent and mess their plans up in a blink… 😉 This adds quite a tactical player interaction to the game!

Additionally to your secret goals, you also aim for mushrooms, that score based on the level they are placed on -  so you try to keep all these in mind, while also aiming for disrupting your opponent's supposed plans and not setting them up. All this requires the right timing which is then spiced up by snake-draft: players take 1-2-1 pairs, then you switch in the next round. A very clever mix, we really enjoyed it! 😊