Who doesn't love theme parks?
🎠 Fabelland is all about dropping meeples, building and activating attractions and using influencers to your advantage, all in an effort to get the most balloons 🎈 with your magical theme park. It is also a game we completely missed and never heard of before. As we spotted people playing it at Spielwiesn, it immediately caught our attention and we had to try it too.🥰
🖼️ It is a very attractive game where you puzzle together the board made of a central part and three carousels (only 2 with 2p). The theme is not very serious - as you can see from the silly illustrations of the cards. 😅
⚙️ The rules are quite simple. Each round you draw an event card that will modify some rules, then you draw some meeples from a bag and drop them in one of the carousels. This will randomly allocate meeples of 3 different colors.
After this everyone can plan their turn and use a dial to pick one of 6 different actions - though these are actually only 2 actions, but both can be done in 3 different places.
So you either:
🛒 Buy new attractions or influencers, paying with balloons. (Balloons are currency AND the points you want to collect.) Influencers have one-use abilities, and a set collection aspect. New attraction cards go around one of the carousels which you can fill up later.
♻️ Rotate a carousel, filling up the attraction cards around it with meeples of the matching color. Each wheel has 6 segments that correspond to the card slots. Activated attractions generate balloons for their owner, so you have to be careful not to help your opponents too much.
Every time attractions are activated, meeples from them are dropped back to the central board. After using a buy action on the central board, you drop meeples back into one of the carousels. This is the main puzzle of the game - dealing with the random allocation of the meeples and seeing how you can best rotate it for maximum profit.
💬 Fabelland has handful of unique ideas! It is quite a fun family / lightweight game that teaches basic set collection and worker placement. We really liked dropping the meeples 😊 The art is really gorgeous and funny and the colors pop really well.
