Designed by: Jerry Hawthorne
Stuffed Fables is an intriguing beast – part game, part storybook, it is clearly designed for children and adults to sit down and play together, right down to the questions it asks you at the end of each game/story.
Fables sees you take on the roles of a girl’s toys that come to life while she sleeps. As she is changing from toddler to young child, their job is to protect her from the terrors of the night, that take on a variety of forms. In actuality, how this works is that each two-page spread in the storybook has a game board on the left, and story text on the right, and together they function a little like a choose-your-own-adventure book: the actions you take in the game dictate what part of the book to read out, and push the story forward.
Each player, then, is a stuffie – a stuffed toy – that has their own special abilities they can bring into play. Turns are simple – draw five dice from the bag and decide how to use them. Any coloured die can be used for movement, and the red, green and yellow dice have special attributes (melee attack, ranged attack, and search). White dice will – potentially – add stuffing to your stuffie, making it harder for the bad guys to take down, whereas black dice get added to the threat track: when a certain number of dice are reached, any threat is triggered, and will attack.
There is no death for a stuffy, but they can be ‘collapsed’ and need re-stuffing in order to function properly again. They and their team-mates can do this themselves. Mix in a few other things (stuffies can carry up to four items, be affected positively or negatively by status cards, and earn and spend hearts/buttons for actions/items) and you have a busy adventure on your hands, as you fight each obstacle in your path before you can move on to the next stage of the story.
None between players - you work as a team.
Fairly low - if it's not your turn you're either listening to the storybook or watching/contributing to your team's maneuvering around the board.
Each page has its own special rules, but they are pretty straightforward to pick up.
The game can be played as a 'campaign' - going through the stories in chronological order - and once you've done that you know how each story ends. But there is nothing to stop you playing through them again if you don't mind that.
2-4
Players
8+
Years
60-90
Mins
Sam says
Stuffed Fables is a real oddity - its component parts feel slightly irregular to me: the stories are about a very young girl but seem to be pitched at kids a bit older. The rules are heavier again, and you certainly want a grown-up around for those first couple of plays. And the miniatures in the box verge on nightmarish, not unlike some of Sid (the crazy boy next door)'s toys in Toy Story. These don't seem suitable for the very young, so as a gaming confection it's an odd mix, and for me personally, not a massive hit. But my eldest enjoyed it a lot, and with good reason - it's fast-moving, and for all the weird creatures and disturbing idea of these coming out while you sleep, it negates the sense of peril to a large degree by having the stuffies virtually indestructible. Kids may well love a series of adventure stories where you're the heroes, but those nippers with an active imagination might find elements of it disturbing. If the story thing appeals, then grown-ups might get more of a kick out of the absurdly silly Tales of the Arabian Nights, and kids can have a more active role in what the story actually is in Untold: Adventures Await.