Don’t Tiptoe Past the Fairy Ring Board Game

Fairy Ring is a family game, and looks like it might be a game for little kids, but there’s way more going on under the mushroom cap here. The rules themselves are simple, but the way you move your fairy token each turn presents a lovely bit of mental calculation that makes this game both a winner and a way to sneak a little mathing into your kids’ day.

In Fairy Ring, players will create little “villages” of mushroom cards in front of them, stacking cards of the same mushroom type or using them to start new columns, and then move their fairy around the table, through all players’ villages, the number of spaces shown on the card they just played. If your fairy finishes its movement on one of your mushroom columns, you score for it, and no one else gets anything. (Fairies can be selfish little runts.) If it finishes on another player’s mushroom, then they score, and you only score if you have a column of the same type of mushroom in your village. After each turn, players pass all of the cards in their hand to their left—a mechanic known as “card drafting”—and play continues until each player has one card left in their hands, which is discarded. You repeat the process one more time with the second season’s deck, which has more valuable cards of the same mushroom types, and play continues until each player has 12 mushroom cards in their village. Then the game ends and the player with the most points wins, as you may have guessed.

Each mushroom type scores in its own way, of course. The game would be fairly boring otherwise. Feh-ry Ring? (I’ll see myself out.) Mushrooms give you mana, which you collect until you have 20, at which point you can exchange them for one victory point on your dial. Purple mushrooms just score a fixed number of mana points printed on each card. Orange ones score more for the column based on how many cards are in it, from three (for one card) to 24 (for four). Yellow cards give you one mana per mushroom column, not card, in your village. Pinks score mana equal to the number of spaces your fairy moved. And greens score one per visible firefly in your village; some cards have fireflies on them, but they may be obscured when you stack another card on top of them, so it’s often more beneficial to create a new column instead. Blue ‘spring’ mushrooms score differently. If you land on a blue mushroom, no one scores. If you pass over one, however, the owner collects the mana shown on the cards in that column. It’s automatic, like EZ-Pass. Or passive income for the fairy who wants to work from home.

There are also three public objectives available in each game, with a full victory point as the reward for achieving them. They’re all very simple to grasp—10 visible fireflies, four mushrooms of at least two cards, six different mushroom types, etc. Three victory points, if you achieve all of them, are pretty significant in a game where 12 or 13 is a winning score, so I wouldn’t ignore them. The rulebook treats these as a variant and suggests playing several games without them, but they are so easy to understand and don’t require you to go out of your way to hit them that I’d play them from game one.

The real meat of the game is in trying to optimize your turns so that you’re getting the most benefit from the card you’re playing, which is usually a long-term consideration, and from where your fairy is landing, which is an immediate one. You want to get to your own village when you can, but that’s not always possible, especially in the second season, so you want to land on an opponent’s mushroom that doesn’t score a ton for them, but that you have in your own village so you can score more. It’s a lot of scenarios to run through, at least early in rounds when you have more cards in your hand, and those calculations get harder as the game progresses. Some cards also have variable movement powers, introducing another variable into the decision. It’s not complex, but it’s challenging. I think it hits the perfect sweet-spot for keeping a family game interesting for all ages without resorting to a big pile of randomness.

Fairy Ring’s recommended age range is 8 and up, and I agree, and the suggested play time of 40 minutes is accurate at least for two or three players. I’ve played it with two, three, and four players, and it’s much better with four than with three, and with two it loses something because your fairy just doesn’t have that many places to go. It’s not awful at two, but the best part of the game is muted. I got one play in at Gen Con 2024, then didn’t get it to the table again until right after the New Year, but it was a big hit here and I think it’s great for families with kids in that 8-12 age range.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.