Faraway

Welcome to Alula – a mythical continent full of friendly locals, gorgeous views and hidden depths. Your journey through this mysterious kingdom will burn your brain, delight your senses and leave you itching to come back for more.

Travelin’ man

In Faraway you are an explorer, taking an epic hike through the continent of Alula. You’ll be building a personal tableau of 8 cards to represent that journey. On each turn, you’ll play a card from your hand of 3 out into your tableau. Each of these cards has a colour to represent the habitat your adventurer is visiting (red, blue, green or yellow), and a number which represents the length of time taken to travel there.

Most cards will also feature a wonderfully illustrated traveller you’ve met on the road who will give you a quest – a mechanic that should be very familiar to any of you who’ve ever played any open-world video games. Fulfilling these quests will be the main route to scoring points.

Each player will reveal their played cards simultaneously – the player who played the lowest number card has travelled the shortest journey, and therefore gets to pick from the shared market first to refresh their hand. However, if you play a higher number card than the card you have previously played, you have the option to explore sanctuaries. Sanctuaries are a deck of smaller cards which provide you with resources or colours to sue towards fulfilling quests, or they can provide additional scoring quests themselves. Crucially, the colours or resources on sanctuary cards count towards scoring regardless of when they are played – more on that later.

At this point you may be thinking this all seems fairly straightforward – where’s the brain burn you promised us?! Well hold on, dear readers – Faraway has a devilish trick up its sleeve. After your 8 cards are played out from left to right and the journey is complete, scoring is then calculated from right to left, with nothing played before the card in question (except sanctuaries!) counting towards scoring. The easiest way to do this is to flip the cards that were played before face down, jotting up the scores for the ‘active’ card before moving to the next card in the tableau. The most points at the end of the journey wins.

There and back again

There’s a great round-by-round push and pull of decisions that is agonising in the very best way. It’s often a sensible move to put your high-scoring quests early in the journey, meaning the rest of the game becomes a frantic scrabble for the resources you need to meet their requirements. But what’s the best way to do that? Should I play a low number to get that card I really need, or should I play a high number to get a sanctuary card which might help me net a crucial resource? Whichever card you play, you’ll likely either be giving up priority for taking a card from the market, or you’ll be forgoing the opportunity to grab a sanctuary. That core conundrum is always engaging and optimising the best tableau is addictive and satisfying.

But it’s the scoring mechanism that turns what appears at first glance to be a relatively simple and unassuming card game into a delightfully brain-burny puzzle. It seems like such a straightforward idea to have scoring take place from back to front, but it requires a certain kind of mental gymnastics I’ve not had many other games make me perform. You have to be thinking ahead or you’ll crash and burn quite spectacularly – I’ve had friends slump in their chairs in horror when it comes to scoring and they realise their tableau just doesn’t work, and punch the air in triumph when they pull off the high-risk quest that wins them the game.

While the scoring is unique and challenging, it can occasionally result in a less than satisfying outcome. There’s no way of knowing what cards will be available later on, so the luck of the draw can sometimes work against you. While that can be mitigated to an extent with sanctuary cards, there will be times where the cards you need simply don’t show up and your score will be low through no fault of your own.

It’s also not the most intuitive game to grasp. My first teach of this was met with a lot of blank stares and silence, but that may say more about my teaching ability than anything! It’s really a game you’ll get to grips with as you play – the first game or two might be a little rough, but eventually there will be a eureka moment among players as the concepts and scoring start to make sense. Once that happens, you’ll be hooked – games race along at around a 20 minute runtime even at higher player counts, so don’t be surprised if that one quick game you were planning on playing turns into three or four as the puzzle reels you in.

This is the way

I think this game is terrific. It packs an awful lot of crunchy decisions and engaging gameplay into a small box and a short runtime. The cards are beautifully illustrated, with the characters and artwork looking like something out of an indie RPG video game. This adds a sprinkle of theme to an experience which could easily have been very unthematic. While the impact of luck can be frustrating at times, the core mechanics and decisions are always interesting and moreish, leaving you wanting more. I can see this being a go-to opening game at my board game club and I’ll be happy to make the return journey to Alula for a long while yet.