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In Fit To Print, a frantic Newspaper themed tile placement game, you aim to build the best mix of articles and pictures for the all the Forest’s latest, greatest paper, all the while making sure you have enough adverts to cover your costs. Over 3 timed rounds (Friday, Saturday and Sunday editions), meet that deadline and become the greatest hack there is, beat the competition and produce the Woodland’s ONLY must-see weekend read!
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
As with any polyomino game, this is all about tile placement: Fit to Print in more ways than one! I do love a terrible pun, and this game has them in droves. Each player has a double-sided, fold out board: the front has two broadsheet pages of differing sizes for the Friday and Saturday editions, and the reverse is larger again for the Sunday. The fold line is just that, the line of the broadsheet which itself has mechanical implications: the x (which varies in position from paper to paper) is the anchor mark for your main splash headlines, which will also govern your bonus points mechanic for the round (for example, two good news stories R above the line). You place tiles around these to make up your front page, aiming for a balance of good and bad news, adverts (for revenue) and pictures that match the story themes (colour-coded green, pink or red). It’s extremely intuitive and simple… so far.
STOP PRESS!
The catch is that you’re in a race against time and each other for not only the best stories but to get to print. All of the tiles are initially face-down, and you must pick them up and either place them on your (charming 3d cardstock) desk or back in the pile face-up. You will be penalised for blank space on your page, but also for unused stories on your desk (no hoarding!) so it’s vital that you have a balance. Tiles can be placed facedown onto your newspaper when you get to the layout phase, but score nothing (think of them as extra text on existing articles). This leads to a frantic game of pick-up, as you are encouraged to do the whole thing against a 3, 4 or 5 minute timer, depending on the desired difficulty. It’s extremely tense, as a result, and enormous fun. We were worried that relative levels of skill in spatial awareness would really disadvantage some players (read: I’m rubbish at Tetris) but actually we found you get the hand of it very, very quickly, particularly as, round to round, the face-up pile increases significantly (and articles can’t be reused across rounds).
PICTURE THIS
The art is bright and cheerful, with plenty of terrible puns and wry nods. I wasn't sure how I'd feel about the anthropomorphic animals, but that just adds to the humour - and it's mechanically interesting also, such as the Raccoon journalist not having being penalised for keeping a trash (ha) article each round. Speaking of which, the component quality is great. Impressively heavy Cardstock, accessible (if rather wee) symbols, and the 3D desks are both cute and practical in game. As mentioned, the different types of content are colour coded also, and the various starting headlines mean that the challenges are always varied whilst staying on theme: for example, one headline is an exposé on lack of parking spaces, which mechanically rewards you for having blank space on your front page.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Fit To Print is a bit heavier than your usual fast play game, but that's no bad thing. We were lucky enough to get hold of the KS edition, which adds new Editor cards each round that introduce layout restrictions, but even without this (and it hasn’t been included in our scores), another sure-fire hit that's straight into regular rotation.