Faraway

Eight cards. That’s the entire game, one region tile played per round for eight rounds, and then you flip your tableau face down and reveal it again from the last card back to the first. It sounds like nothing on paper and it is genuinely one of the more disorienting little puzzles I’ve played this year, because everything you learned about tableau games, play your best stuff early, build toward a strong finish, is exactly backwards here.

The tableau itself is where my one real gripe lives. Your personal layout is a straight left-to-right line of eight cards with sanctuary rewards tucked alongside, and at two or three players it reads fine at arm’s length, but push it to five and you’re squinting across the table trying to remember whose faded parchment icon means what. It’s not a dealbreaker, the icons themselves are clean once you know them, but the physical footprint of everyone’s tableau side by side asks more of your table space and your eyes than a filler this size should.

What keeps me coming back is the actual puzzle of it. You want to draft high-numbered cards for their scoring requirements, but high numbers don’t earn you sanctuary bonuses, and sanctuary bonuses are how you fix your hand when the requirements don’t line up. Play too conservatively, low to high, and you’ll draft plenty of bonus cards that score nothing once the reveal hits your later, more demanding tiles. Play the aggressive high-to-low line and you’ll starve for bonuses but set up a stronger back half. There’s no dominant strategy that I’ve found in a dozen plays, which for a game this short and this cheap to reset is exactly what you want out of a filler.

It won’t reinvent anyone’s collection and there’s essentially no theme to speak of past a manual that tries gamely to sell you on it. But the art’s genuinely striking, the rounds move fast enough that “one more game” is basically the default outcome, and the backwards-scoring hook is a real idea, not just a gimmick bolted onto an ordinary set-collection frame. Best at two, still solid up through four, worth the fifteen minutes every time.