“Collections,” she calls her stuff, when really they’re castoff tupperwares filled with chunks of cement and the occasional geode. Penny is one of those kids who hoards and organizes. As other sandbox kids join him, they bring their own implements of make-believe warfare until your group possesses a veritable army of playthings. Sarge is the kind of kid who digs around in the sandbox and plays with toy soldiers. Rather nicely, this already makes internal sense. Penny lets you move either a toy or some pizza from your Stuff to your Pack for each glue symbol. When you play a card like Sarge, he allows you to gain a toy for every symbol you reveal from the shovel suit. Skateboards, squirt guns, those twisty-necked bottles of liquid glue these are the everyday childhood items that represent suits in Fort. You see, most cards have actions that can be improved by - you guessed it - playing matching suits. In theory, it’s possible to play all of your cards, but only in the rare event that all of their suits match. Unlike most deck-building games, you’ll only play a single card per turn. Like most deck-building games, each turn’s decision space revolves around a hand of five random cards. Your personal fort grows to hold more stuff and extra lookouts. It’s also entirely intuitive in a way that Rodiek’s SPQF was not. Not only is it cheerily nostalgic, grateful for its rose-tinted glasses and unconcerned with whatever anxieties might otherwise darken its sunny days. How well does it support everything you’ll do while playing? Does it glue together the game’s actions and iconography, its terms and victory conditions? In this regard, Fort is almost naturalistic in how closely its halves cohere.
At the absolute least, a game’s setting can be evaluated by its utility. Perfectly evoked by Kyle Ferrin’s artwork, which challenges Charles Schulz’s monopoly on bobble-headed youngsters, Fort leans hard on its new setting. Kids rebounding and finding new friends to hang out with. Kids who sometimes feel spurned by perceived slights. Kids making macaroni sculptures and playing make-believe.
Kids organizing their own little cliques. But no less impressive is the cleverness of Nick Brachmann and everyone else at Leder Games, who took Rodiek’s game and gave it a makeover - by dropping the cutesy silvan Romans for something a little different: Rodiek’s original SPQF intelligently expanded upon the foundations of deck-building games in ways we’ll talk about momentarily. When it comes to board game design, there are different, albeit parallel, forms of talent.