Post from 10/18/2023

Faraway is a small-box card-drafting tableau-building game for 2-6 players. We basically bought it at #SPIEL23 because it looks so great - which shows how important looks can be! Luckily for us the gameplay is also fun. 😊 You are explorers on a continent, where you see new places and meet all kinds of people, and your tableau is a record of this journey.
Let me explain how it works! 🕵️

During a game you will play 8 location cards in a row, then do the scoring to see who wins. Sounds simple, but there are 2 main twists that make decisions more layered! 🧐

1️⃣ When the game ends you will flip down all of your cards and start flipping and scoring them from back-to-front. As cards might have different prerequisites that “unlock” them, you have to be careful to play your row in a way so that high scoring cards that need a lot of things are in the very front.

2️⃣ The second thing contradicts this a bit. ☝️Location cards have an order number on them - if you play a card with a bigger number than the last one in your row, you get to draw a special bonus card. These either have their own scoring conditions, or just have colors or icons that help with the scoring of your other cards.

So ideally you want to play cards in ascending order for the bonus cards, however bigger number location cards have better scoring conditions and thus more prerequisites, so they do better at the front of the row (so scored last). This provides the main challenge of the game, making the decision of what card to draft at the end of your turn, or which card to play much more nuanced.

There are many types of cards. 🃏 They might score for each color or resource icon type in your tableau, or for sets of things. Many just give flat points but need you to have a set number of resources to do so. Some have clue symbols that allow you to draft the bonus cards from multiple ones. Your job is to make a synergistic tableau that is also correctly laid out to maximize your score.

Small, fast, and fun. The ideal gateway game. 🙂