In Fairy Season, you’ll use your hand management skills to lure fairies into your stash. Send Goblins out in the forest and set traps to capture as many as you can because the player who catches the most fairies wins!

You know we love a good card game! Read on to find out our thoughts on how Fairy Season stacks up!

How Do You Play Fairy Season?

Fairy Season is a very easy game to learn and play.

There are a couple different types of cards: Season Fairies (numbered 1-8 in each of the four seasons,) Royal Fairy Cards (these are special/wild cards,) Goblins, and Traps.

Season Fairy Play Restrictions

Season fairy cards must be played in order, going from Spring to Winter, and played with their numbers ascending. So if someone plays a 5 Summer Fairy card, you can play a 5 or higher Summer Fairy card or switch the season to Autumn, but can never play a lower number or skip over Autumn to play a Winter Season card. 

Goblins, Traps, and Royal Fairies may be played at any time, even if you have a Season Fairy you can play.

Play Overview:

First you’ll shuffle the entire deck and deal 5 cards to each player with the remaining cards forming the draw deck. 

In turn order, players will play a card from their hand into the “swarm” (otherwise known as the discard pile) then will take the action of the card they played.

Each player also has a “stash” where they will place cards they acquire through actions into to earn points.

Your goal is to wisely play cards from your hand into the swarm, taking actions that either earn you points or set you up for your next turn. If you cannot or choose not to play, you “flunk.” This makes the next player have to continue play with a Royal Fairy card. If they cannot, then the last player to play wins the swarm, taking all of the cards into their stash. Players draw back up to five cards, then play begins again with the last player who flunked.

Once the deck has run out, the game is over. Players gather their stash and count one point for every Season Fairy and two points for every Royal Fairy. Goblins and traps do not score. The player with the most points wins. 

If however someone manages to collect all four Royal Fairy cards during the game they automatically win the game. 

What Do We Think?

Overall our impressions on Fairy Season were a bit mixed. 

We liked the look of the game. The art is beautiful and engaging. We also like that it plays pretty quickly and doesn’t overstay its welcome. 

It is simple enough for nearly the whole family to enjoy. While the box suggests this for ages 10 and up, this can be enjoyed by players as young as 7 or 8. There’s minimal reading required and the mechanics are easily picked up. 

However, the game itself we felt was only okay. Neither spectacular nor terrible. This is always a rough spot for a game to fall in. There’s definitely some better card games out there that I would suggest over this one, especially in the trick taking category. 

While Fairy Season says it is a trick-taking game, we didn’t find it to be — at least in the traditional sense of the word. No one is ever forced to follow suit, you can change suits from season to season whenever you want or choose to not play a season at all. There’s no way to ever really grab control of the round, forcing players to empty their hands in orders they would rather not. 

You can choose to strategically flunk at times to try and flush Royal Fairies, yet no one is ever required to play them, so it doesn’t really work either. 

The best strategy we found was to just rush the seasons, skipping to the next whenever possible, so the swarm didn’t get too big and you hopefully caught people in winter so you could take the swarm. But this didn’t lead to memorable game play with those fun moments you think about after the game has ended.

Again, it’s not bad, everyone we played it with found it pleasant but it didn’t get much higher praise than that.

Summary

Despite its pretty art and quick to pick up game play, there just isn’t enough game in Fairy Season to make it memorable. Being just an “ok” game is a hard space for games like this to live in because we all want to find “great” games, so while this one isn’t a bad game by any means, we think there are better options out there for you and your family to play. 

From Good Games Publishing, we recommend checking out Fluttering Souls. This is a lovely two player card game at an even better price point. (Review)

If you’re looking for great trick taking experiences we recommend looking into:

Skull King (One of the most solid trick taking games available! Review)
The Crew (our favorite card game from this year! Review)
Diamonds (one of the cleverest takes on trick taking games we’ve played! Mentioned)

A special thank you to Good Games Publishing for sending us a copy of Fairy Season for review.
As always our thoughts and opinions are our own. 

Game Info:
Title: Fairy Season
Players: 3-5
Designer: Dan Fish, Gavin Jenkins
Artist: Sean Andrew Murray
Publisher: Good Games Publishing

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