Real-time games are an outlier on the tabletop—that’s a style more associated with videogames, at the very least. Games where players are scrambling to grab things from the same pile at the same time are usually dexterity games, ones that reward quickness or precision, rather than actual strategy games. There’s one huge exception among strategy games that long-time gamers might know in Galaxy Trucker, which, in my humble opinion, did this so well that few designers were willing to try it.
Enter Fit to Print, the latest game from designer Peter McPherson (Tiny Towns, Wormholes) and Flatout Games (Cascadia, Calico), which has a similar real-time element to Galaxy Trucker and combines it with some spatial reasoning to give players a different sort of challenge. Everyone grabs tiles from the common supply, and once you’ve got what you think is the right number and variety, you move to the layout stage and place them—but once you’ve started placing them, you can’t take any more tiles or put them back.
Players in Fit to Print are publishers of cutesy woodland newspapers—newspapers used to be important sources of reliable information, delivered to your doorstep daily on a material made from dead trees—and will put out three editions of increasing size on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. (I most recently played this game on a Thursday and can confirm it still works.) During a round, which has a standard length of four minutes but can be customized to your group’s preferences, you’ll grab article, photo, and ad tiles from the giant pile in the middle of the table which has some face-up tiles and some face-down ones. If you follow the rules to a T, you can only use one hand to take a tile, then flip it if it’s face-down, after which you must place it on your cardboard desk or return it to the center. Once you’ve got enough tiles, you shout “Layout!” and move on to the next phase, where you will place all of your tiles, including your larger Centerpiece tile, to try to fill your entire board while following all of the placement rules:
- You can’t put two photos next to each other.
- You can’t put two ads next to each other.
- You can’t put two articles of the same color (green, blue, pink) next to each other.
You want to minimize your unused spaces, while placing articles next to photos that match certain symbols to gain more points. At the end of each round, you score 1 or 2 points for each article, points for your photos, points from your centerpiece tile, and then lose points if you didn’t balance your happy and sad stories perfectly. Players compare their largest empty spaces on their boards, and the player with the smallest such area gets a bonus while the player with the largest of all loses points. You also gain dollars from your ads, which matters for end-game—the player with the lowest revenue total loses automatically! (In a two-player game, this rule doesn’t apply; if one player has more than $5 less than the other, they lose 10 points.)
Fit to Print is an incredibly easy game to play, especially if you choose not to use the unique player powers, which are modest but useful, or the Breaking News cards, which add one rules change for each round. You take tiles, and you place them. The rulebook offers alternative ways to play, including turn-based rules, family play (ditching even the centerpiece tokens), and team play, as well as a solo mode that just requires you to get $12 in ad revenue by the end of the game. The challenge is that you have to take all the tiles you need before you place any of them. You have to estimate how many tiles will cover your space, and in what configuration, and make sure you have a balance of all of the types, while also considering photos and your centerpiece’s scoring rules. I’ve found this to be really, really hard; I’ve missed by a lot just in straight-up coverage, getting too few tiles or too many tiles by an embarrassing margin, but that’s probably the part of the game I find the most fun, too.
The tile shapes aren’t that varied, and that turns out to be a huge key to playing Fit to Print well. Tiles range from 3×4 down to 1×4, with nothing smaller than that last one, and those 1×4 (or 4×1—any tile’s orientation is fixed by the art on it) tiles are extremely important. They offer one point for articles or one dollar for ads, so if you get three 1×4 articles with the same orientation, you can line them up next to each other and fill a 3×4 space for 3 points, which is more than you’d get from any one tile of that size. I don’t know if that’s a hack, necessarily, as it’s not that easy to get those tiles in the right configurations, but I do think getting a solid number of those tiles in each round is key to filling out your board in a point- and revenue-efficient way.
The art, by the way, is incredibly charming. It’s by Ian O’Toole, who’s done some great work on heavier games by designer Vital Lacerda (Lisboa, Kanban EV) and other games like Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road, which is one of the best-looking games I own. Fit to Print’s art is more than just aesthetically pleasing, though, as every article tile has a unique headline, and every ad tile has unique copy, much of it very funny if you’re a fan of puns—which, as a dad, I most certainly am. The ad for a concert starring Petallica, Wooden Maiden, and HISS, each name styled in the same way as the parodied band’s logo, is my favorite, certainly. The theme fits the game play, but the art leans so hard into the theme that I find it impossible to think of the game without it.
Because the rule book offers so many ways to customize the game, you could easily play this with younger players, even ones who are early readers, and still have a great time. The only text for players is on the Centerpiece tiles and the optional extra cards, so you can choose whether to use those if you have younger kids. The real-time aspect will definitely appeal to kids, as long as they don’t go all Cookie Monster and eat the tiles or anything, but it has the benefit of gating the total playing time—you can absolutely play an entire game in less than 20 minutes if you’re disciplined between the rounds. My only real complaint about Fit to Print is that I absolutely can not get everything back in the box without removing the cardboard insert. It’s a fantastic family game that plays quickly and gives you solid replayability.
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.