Faraway Review

At first glance, Faraway doesn’t look that spectacular. Play eight location cards in a row, check the requirements for scoring on them, and accumulate the points. If that’s all that there was to Faraway, it’d be a very ordinary dud, but with one simple tweak to the formula designers Johannes Goupy & Corentin Lebrat transformed it into something pretty special.

The tweak? Spoiler alert: Faraway’s scoring is done backwards.

Getting into the corners

Have you ever gone to make yourself a slice of toast, only to find that there’s no butter left in the tub? You end up desperately trying to get every last bit on your knife, resulting in a layer of butter a few microns thick on your toast. That transparent layer of butter you’ve got, that’s about as thick as the theme on the game of Faraway.

The rulebook tells you that you’re exploring the mysterious continent of Alula, venturing out on expeditions during the day and night to explore and catalogue the animals, plants, and minerals. You encounter denizens who’ll award you with fame (VPs) for completing their quests. Quests amount to “have these icons by the time you score this card“. Each expedition card has a number on it which represents the amount of time that expedition takes, and smaller numbers here mean you’re more likely to be able to play higher numbers on the following turn, resulting in finding Sanctuaries.

This all sounds very exciting, full of adventure and mystery, I know. The truth, however, is that none of this will mean anything to you once you start. The game is reduced to focusing on numbers, icons, and colours, and in all honesty, it’s not a bad thing. If anything, it turns into one of the game’s strengths, because the scoring, which I’ll come to shortly, is deceptively difficult to get your head around at first.

Re-e-e-wind

Let’s get into it then. Let’s get into the bit that every critic who gets their teeth into Faraway – me included – will laud as so clever and different. The scoring.

Over the eight rounds that the game lasts for, you add a single card to your row at a time. Once the eighth and final card is played, you turn them all over and then flip each card in turn, checking its criteria to see if you score any fame / VPs. The kicker is that the first card you flip is the last card you played, and the first card you played ends up being the final one you flip and score.

You can only count icons you have uncovered at the time when you score a card, so if that last card you played demands that you have three of the blue stone icons to your name, there’s a good chance that that card on its own won’t fulfil that requirement, so you won’t score any points. You might now have the dawning realisation in your brain that the early cards are the ones you should aim for the high VPs, the ones with the most demanding requirements. That first card you placed down can use all eight revealed location cards for icons.

The locations aren’t the only way to get points, icons, and card colours (which is another way to score points). Every time you play a card with a higher duration value than the previous one, you find a sanctuary which gives you a smaller bonus card to add to your area. Sanctuary cards add end-game scoring opportunities and icons which stay face-up to help towards your location card quests. If you’ve got Clue icons on display when you draw Sanctuary cards, you get to draw more cards to choose from. These little sanctuary cards can result in some beefy bonuses, so don’t neglect them.

It all sounds so simple, right? Play cards, and try to make sure that when you work back to the start you have all the things you need to score the cards. Take my word for it when I tell you it’s so much trickier than you think, and it’s brilliant for it.

Final thoughts

Faraway has a ton of hype and praise floating around at the moment. Ordinarily, I like to wait a month or two for hype to die off, but Hachette Boardgames UK sent me a copy of the game to play, and I’ve played it lots not only in-person, but also with the excellent BGA adaptation which you can go and play right now. Well, not right now, finish reading the review first, but afterwards go play. It’s one of those games that actually deserves the hype, and deserves its recent As d’Or win.

Every single card you play, every card you pick up at the end of each round, each Sanctuary card you pick from those on offer. Every decision is a Siren, calling you onto the rocks of indecision. You’ll get to the halfway point of the game and as you go to play your fifth card you’ll think “Maybe I can play this high-scoring card and manage to get the missing icons in the next few turns…”, at the expense of playing a card you definitely need for an earlier card. It’ll keep tempting right up until the end, and you’ll keep falling for it.

All of this decision and indecision, and temptation wrestling with tactics in your mind, plays out quickly. You can rattle through a game of Faraway in 20 minutes, giving you plenty of time to shuffle the decks and play again immediately after, during which you swear you won’t be tempted again. You will be tempted, and you’ll make the same mistakes again and again while your child / spouse / dog beats you for the umpteenth time.

Faraway will cost you about £20 when it releases by the looks of it, which is a bargain for a game which delivers a lot of fun. Not much interaction, apart from the race to claim cards from the market, but a lot of fun all the same. Bravo Johannes & Corentin.

Review copy kindly provided by Hachette Boardgames UK. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

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