Fit to Print Second Opinion

“Alright Parker! Get me pictures of Spider-Man!”

If you’ve ever felt the urge to be a journalist and newsprint editor, and be yelled at by J. Jonah Jameson, then you might be in the right place. Enter, Fit to Print, a game by Peter McPherson of Tiny Towns fame, to bring you another town of anthropomorphic animals to work. This time, you are rival reporters, trying to keep your newspaper afloat.

The Game

Fit to Print is a real time, tile placement game, where players are trying to fill their newspaper on three different days to get the news and pictures out to their little village. Firstly, players are given their Centrepiece tile, which may give some focus for the tiles the player wants to grab. Each round, the players will have a set time to run through two phases, where they are trying to complete their paper for the day. Each day has a slightly different sized paper, so keep your eye on that. The first phase is the Reporting Phase, where the players grab tiles from a facedown supply, and decide if they want to add them to their desk. If they don’t, the tiles go face up back to the supply for other players to grab at some point.

Once a player has taken all the tiles they think they need to fill their paper, they shout “Layout” and move to the Layout Phase. They can no longer take new tiles from the supply, and instead use their remaining time to place the tiles onto their newspaper. There are several placement rules which must be followed:

• The Centrepiece Tile must be placed covering the star on the newspaper
• Tiles must be within the boundary of the day’s newspaper.
• The tiles may be placed over the fold of the paper (unless something says otherwise).
• Tiles must be placed in the correct orientation.
• Photos must not be adjacent to each other.
• Adverts must not be adjacent to each other.
• Same coloured Articles must not be adjacent to each other.
• Tiles can be placed facedown, but must still be in the correct orientation.

Once a player has finished placing their tiles, or they cannot place any more, they say “Print” and grab the next available Finishing Tile. Their round is done, and they wait for the others to finish.

After all players have finished, check each other’s boards. Like in Galaxy Trucker, any tiles which are placed next to a like tile do not score, and the player chooses one of the incorrect tiles to flip facedown. Any tiles which overhang or are incorrectly orientated are placed on the players Desk for a future round. Then we move to scoring for the round.

Players score the points indicated on the Articles, points for the Photo tiles based on the criteria on the tile, and points for the Centrepiece Tile. Then, each player looks at their largest area of white space and counts the squares. Whomever has the smallest scores a bonus 3 points. The player with the largest area of white space loses 1 point and all other players gain a point.

Next, count the difference between the smiley and sad icons, and lose a point for each point of difference. Finally, count up the number of dollars from advertising and then total up the points.
For the set up of the next rounds, discard the current Centrepiece Tiles and return all Tiles on the newspapers back to the supply. Draw a number of new Centrepiece Tiles equal to the player count (an additional one for a 2-player game) and in order of the Finishing Tiles, players choose a new one.

At the end of the third round, total up all the scores from each round and check the total ad revenue. Whichever player has the lowest value of revenue immediately loses and is out of the game. Whoever has the most points from the remaining players wins.

There are some additional optional rules, like shortening the time from five minutes to four or three minutes to make the time crunch more intense, or adding a Character Power for each player, but that’s up to you to find.