Everything about Fika, the new small box two player card game from designer Pieter Van Gompel (a/k/a ‘Kwibus Game Design‘), is misleading. But like any good pastry, the misdirection is worth the pain of the workout you’ll need to overcome the calories.
I guess we should talk about the gameplay, although the absolutely gorgeous art screams to be talked about first. In Fika, the ‘Clever Coffee Break’ game, two players run rival cafes on a side street in a small town in Sweden. Hanks and Ryan. Boyega and Tran. SneauxBunny and Dr. Gumbo. Pick your favorite meet cute couple and insert them here.
Each player has a hand of six cards to play five of them to their cafe. The entire playing deck only contains eighteen cards (1-6, each in one of three different suits). That sounds deceptively simple, but each card does not one, not two, not three, but four different things: they have a suit, a number, a special power, and like the little whipped cream heart in every instapost ad everywhere, a scoring objective.
Whew.
I had to catch my breath there. If you thought when you opened the box that this would be a simple little card game about playing five cards to your cafe and then scoring, well, essentially it is. But the rub is the crossover between those special powers and the scoring objectives, and what they will do to our star-crossed rivals.
Each of the six cards scores completely different. Like any tableau builder, and this is the tiniest of them all, it’s brain burning fun to stare at your hand of six cards, and the four face up cards in the general supply, and plot out a simple path to laying out your best five options for scoring. Games like this generate my favorite moments — a chalk hand, plus another great card in the general supply, all tied together by placements that score on multiple cards.(Note for the nit-picky — each card scores only once, but the same situation can be scored on multiple cards.)
Of course, your opponent is not going to let you just waltz in here and build the biggest book shop busiest little cafe on the street. No sirreebob. That’s where those special powers come in handy, and each is unique. One allows you to switch the positions of the cards in your cafe. That’s a neat trick if you are trying to get two cards of the same number lined up next to each other. Another allows you to switch the position of a card in your cafe with a card in the other cafe. Take that! They are all situationally useful, and recognizing those times requires skill or time or both.
But that’s not all. As if these multiple levels weren’t enough to roast your beans, there are two groups of coffee drinkers waiting patiently up the street to be fought over by Grant and Bullock. These are two of the regular cafe cards from the deck dealt face down and put to the side. The back side of all of the cafe cards are multipliers, with the orientation either giving the lucky cafe a double or triple multiple, but they only apply when they are face down and in front of the cafes. These group cards are usually part of some of the biggest tussles in the game between me and my wife, because they can turn a measly seven point scoring objective Into a healthy twenty-one’er. Sweet!
The messing around and the movement of the group cards can definitely thwart the best laid plans of your opponent, but since you are just playing five cards or so to the tableau (one of the special powers lets you mess with that a bit), each round of the game goes very quickly, so even the worst damage fades quickly. The objective is to win the best two of three matches, each match only takes minutes to complete, but we enjoy it so much, we are always ready to just set them up again.
Prestidigitation aside, I have to comment on the production. It’s a tiny little box that fits into your hand, just a little bit bigger than Sea Salt & Paper or any of the Oink games, and comes with lovely art by famed artist Beth Sobel, with nary an animal in sight. Instead of cute little cats or salmon, there are wonderful scapes of delicious looking pies and Swedish desserts I won’t even attempt to pronounce. They may not be easy to spell, but they look scrumptious. Plus, the cards that are used to make up the street remind me so much of quiet little backstreets in Madrid or Firenze that it should generate some table talk with any couple that has traveled abroad.
Final verdict: I can’t knock Fika for the misdirection. Yes, it fooled me into thinking this was just a chill little card game. It certainly started out that way but by round two, we had some friendly little barbs going around as we moved and shifted and made our opponent sputter with apoplexy at our devious little card play.
Hey, any good Rom Com has at least one plot twist. All I need now are some flowers, rain falling down, and some Elvis Costello in the background. Fika!
Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler!
— BJ from Board Game Gumbo
A complimentary copy of the game was provided by the publisher.
Board Game Gumbo 