Fuji

Plays: 4Px1.

The Game

Fuji is designed by Wolfgang Warsch, the hot new designer who also designed The Mind, The Quacks of Quedlinburg and Ganz Schon Clever / That's Pretty Clever. Fuji is a cooperative game. You are tourists in Japan, visiting Mount Fuji, only to have it erupt on you. You need to run for shelter. To win the game everyone must make it to a nearby village. If anyone is caught by lava, or dies due to injury during the flight, everybody loses.

This is a scenario card. The game comes with many. You set up a game using the scenario card. The grey spaces are where the volcano (i.e. Mount Fuji) is. The yellow spaces are the village. The spaces with the grey and white pawns are where your characters start. You need to make your way to the village at the other end. Two spaces have volcano icons. The first time anyone enters or passes by such spaces, lava will flow twice at the end of that round. Some spaces have tool icons. You get to pick up tools at these spots.

This is how a game looks like once set up. At the top you can see a small board which records the health situation of every player. As you run away from the lava and head towards the village, you will suffer injury. When you cross certain injury thresholds, you suffer a permanent disability. You may die from your injuries, in which case everyone loses.

Everyone has his own screen, some dice, and a special ability (card on the right). The base colour of the dice is the player's colour, however each die face has another colour, either yellow, purple or light blue.

Every round, what you do is you try to move. You may move at most three steps. Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you fail. Either way, you may get injured. Eventually, lava flows, and if everyone is still alive, you do the next round.

Everyone rolls his dice behind his screen. You cannot tell your teammates what colours or numbers you have rolled. This is key. Based on what you have rolled, you collectively decide who will try to move to which space. To move to a certain space, you need to fulfill the requirements of that space better than your left and right neighbours. Let's take the green player in the photo above as an example. The green pawn is where the green player is. The green disc is where he wants to go. The intended destination has a yellow icon and a 4 icon. This means die rolls with yellow faces and 4's count towards the green player's strength. This strength must be higher than those of both his neighbours. If one of his neighbours has rolled many yellows and 4's, the neighbour will need to warn him it's risky for him to try to move to this particular space. Based on how your teammates propose to move, you can get a rough idea of what they have rolled. Once the discussion is done and everyone has committed to a target destination, those players who are aiming to move fewer than 3 steps get to reroll some or all of their dice. After that the screens are removed, and you check who gets to move and who doesn't.

You take injury if you fail to move. You take injury too if your strength is close to your neighbours, even if you do manage to move. When you injury reaches certain thresholds, you become disabled. E.g. you lose the ability to reroll, you can't use tools anymore, or you lose a die.

Rerolls are important. Often you need to depend on them to make movement successful. When picking dice to reroll, you hope to strengthen yourself for the destination you are aiming at, and weaken yourself for the destinations your neighbours are aiming at. There is risk. Sometimes rerolls make things worse. Normally you don't want to reroll too many dice. Rerolls mean uncertainty. The less the better.

In the middle there is a space with three colours and a straight line. That means dice of any colour with even numbers. Straight line means even numbers. To the left of that card, there's a purple plus wavy line. That means purple dice with odd numbers. Wavy = odd.

This is the difficulty card we used. Level 1 is the lowest difficulty. The first row means if you fail to move, you lose 3 health. The second row means if your strength is only 1 or 2 higher than your neighbours, you lose 2 health. Despite being successful in moving to where you had intended to, you still take injury because the gap is not big enough. Your strength needs to be at least 5 more than both neighbours if you want to avoid injury.

The Play

Playing Fuji is a very different experience. To some extent, it is a little like The Mind, because it is a cooperative game, and there is information which you can't tell your teammates. What is intriguing is having to solve a complicated problem with only fuzzy information. What is exciting is sometimes you need to depend on die rolls to succeed in movement. It is not easy to assess the risk accurately. The game is engaging because you need to discuss a lot with your teammates. You want to make sure you can get to your destination, and you also need to make sure you are not hindering your neighbours from reaching their destinations. Everyone is trying to fulfill three needs at the same time - your own move, and those of both your neighbours. This game presents a very unusual problem.

You have tools and special abilities which help you. You need to decide wisely when best to use them.

Your end goal - the village - has yellow borders. You are safe as soon as your enter the village. You don't need to reach the deepest space. However even after you reach the village, you still need to resolve movement every round, and you may continue to take injury. You need everyone to be in the village before you win. Needless to say, it is usually not a good idea to step back out of the village.

If the blue player succeeds in moving this way, he will cross the volcano marker, and lava will flow twice at the end of the round instead of once.

The second row of dice are light blue (not green). Having rolled these - all being light blue and purple, and most being high numbers - means I can most likely get to this space below...

... which requires both purple and light blue dice. The tool marker means I will get to draw a tool card when I get here. The tool marker will then be discarded.

Those two red cards on the right are lava. The cards have been flipped over to show the card backs. The green player must move now. Else he will be caught by the lava and die, and everyone will lose.

Blue and purple have entered the village. Green and black must get in this round. If they fail to do so, the lava will seal off the entrance of the village, and everyone will lose. We won the game this narrowly. We played the lowest difficulty. I tremble at the thought of playing a higher difficulty.

The Thoughts

The movement mechanism in Fuji is creative and clever. I find the game a refreshing experience. I have never played anything quite like it. You need to discuss and strategise without precise information. It is exciting to see whether your plan pans out. It is sometimes nerve-wracking when you need to reroll. Solving a complicated problem is satisfying. Sometimes you feel exhilarated because you get lucky. Sometimes you feel helpless because your luck sucks. Both cases are equally funny.