This D&D-style board game “pairs gentle strategic fun with tempting press-your-luck mechanics” for a very good time

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Fame & Fable hasn’t hit retail just yet, but you can grab a late pledge at Kickstarter ahead of that wider release. If you want something similar in the meantime, I’d probably try the dungeon-building Boss Monster (which is available at Amazon) or the monster-bashing Here to Slay (also up for grabs at Amazon).

Fame & Fable is a strategic card battler that takes the concept of combat in tabletop roleplaying games like D&D and distills it into a deckbuilding bonanza. Taking cues from combat-focussed TTRPGs, it sees you grappling dangerous foes in the name of fame, recruiting a cast of allies, collecting unique magical items, and pushing your luck in order to fulfil contracts for the people. So far as pitches for the best board games go, that’s pretty strong.

It’s highly competitive as a result with some fun action and light strategic elements that’ll have you discovering endless new abilities for your arsenal and combining them for epic takedowns of some truly legendary monsters. Backed by his own wonderfully flamboyant graphic illustrations, Owen Davey told me Fame & Fable was meant to capture the most fun aspects of tabletop RPGs – which for him is the combat – without all the boring gumph surrounding it. And that, it does.

Fame & Fable features and design

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• Build a team and strategise around how to defeat monsters
• Catch-up mechanics adds actions for those lagging behind
• Luck plays a big part, but there’s enough agency to make you feel epic when you nail a run

This fantasy adventure revolves around hunting monsters for glory and gloating rights. Only one of you can claim the title of Champion, after all, and up to four players will push their luck in an attempt to outdo one another at slaying those beasties.

Slide open the box for Fame & Fable and you’ll be met with just a few card decks, wooden tokens, counters, and a three-panel game board. The latter holds the card market – an open pool of contracts, items and allies that will make up your hand – as well as the fame track which your counters will move around as you score points and earn moon tokens. This is also where the monsters and legends live, but we’ll get to these rascals in a second.

Each player’s starting hand contains a hero card to represent their chosen token, and two allies. All have their own base and special attacks, along with a potential choice of attack types (be these elemental, poison, or simple weapon attacks). You also start with a single unique item, from reviving potions, to poison daggers, even holy hand grenade-style weapons.

Throughout, each player runs through three phases in turn: dawn, day, and dusk. At dawn, empty spaces in the market are refreshed and you receive three action points – that number is upped depending how many moon spaces sit between you and the leading player, which is a great way for lagging players to catch up. Spending an action at dawn along with a moon token lets you ready exhausted allies, and you may spend your new market card to refresh a row in the market if things are looking dire.

Day is the real pulp of the game, bringing glorious battle to those who seek it… and to those who don’t. Here you can spend an action to draw a monster from the open pool or randomly from the deck, each with their own special abilities, resistances, or weaknesses. Confident players might draw a far higher-health legend at random instead, but these take far more of a beating.