Faiyum

 

The Game

Faiyum is a 2020 title from Friedemann Friese (Power Grid, Friday), our mad scientist of a game designer who often comes up with crazy ideas. I've seen many Egyptian-themed games from Reiner Knizia. This is the first time I see one from Friedemann Friese. In Faiyum, you are advisors to the pharaoh, and you have been tasked to develop the Faiyum basin into farmland. Everything you build belongs to Egypt. They are not your private property. That means everyone else can make use of your hard work, and you theirs too. You are developing the country together, yes, but ultimately you are still competing to be the most accomplished advisor to the pharaoh. 

This is the game setup. A small settlement has been built - the red hex. Four brown hexes have been designated as plots for monuments. The yellow, purple and grey hexes can produce grain, grapes and stone respectively. The green pieces are crocodiles. Before you develop anything, you need to chase them away. 

At this particular monument land plot, you can do construction up to 5 times, after which the monument would be completed. 

On your turn you have only 3 options. The first is to play a card. At the start of the game everyone has the same set of cards. Every card specifies what you can do. Whatever you play is stacked before you. You won't be able to use these cards for the moment, until you take them back into your hand. So the second option on your turn is to claim played cards back into your hand. This is a reset. Normally you try to reset when you have no or very few cards in your hand, because resetting does take up one full turn, and the fewer cards you have left, the more money you can earn during a reset. When you claim cards back into your hand, only the top three cards, i.e. the most recently played cards, can be claimed for free. If you want to claim more, you have to pay. With this mechanism, you need to plan your card play carefully. If there are weak cards you don't want to keep around, play them early, so that by the next time you reset, you can intentionally leave them in the stack. If you have good cards you intend to claim, play them late so that you can take them back for free, or at least not have any weak cards blocking your way. 

The third option on your turn is to buy a new card from the market. The core mechanism of this game is the cards. They determine everything you get to do on the board. If there is something you want to achieve on the board, you need to make sure you buy a card which lets you do that. The three options on your turn are all related to cards. 

These are the starting cards. The farmer card lets you place a worker next to an existing worker, and then harvest one resource. The settlement card lets you pay resources to build a settlement. You then gain points and money. 

I play my cards like this, so that I can easily tell which are the cards I intend to claim and which are the ones I plan to abandon. I need to make sure I will have enough money to claim all the cards I plan to use again. 

This was still the early game - more crocodiles around than workers

You buy cards from a market which displays eight cards. When you draw cards to add to the market, all cards must be arranged from low to high. Higher cards are stronger. Only the four lower cards are available to be purchased. Prices are set based on their positions. This is a little like Power Grid. Generally you get weaker cards in the early game, you can see what cards may become available next, and you can prepare yourself for the stronger cards in the late game. 

By buying new cards and abandoning weak cards, you are constantly adjusting your hand of cards. This is the deck-building aspect of Faiyum. What the cards allow you to do all happen on the board. So this does not feel like a deck-building card game. It very much feels like a boardgame. You will be collecting resources, building stuff, making money, and earning points. These are nothing unusual. However the aspect I like about the game is how the player actions have interdependencies. You can only build a workshop if there is a road. Some cards let you score points but you can only do this at settlements. Some cards let you produce many resources, but you can only do this at specific workshops. You can't build all the infrastructure by yourself. It's going to be a group effort. So you need to watch what kind of things your opponents are doing, and adjust your plan accordingly. If nobody is spending effort on grain farms, getting the grain farm scoring card will not be very useful. Rarity and abundance are determined by the collective actions of the players. 

As Faiyum was further developed, we had three settlements (red discs) at this point, and a humble road network. More crocodiles had been chased away. 

The card deck is your countdown mechanism. Near the bottom there are four disaster cards. The game ends after all four of them show up. Near game end there will be powerful cards which help players score many points. You have to be prepared and save money for them. 

The Play

The first time you play, be prepared to refer to the rulebook frequently. There are many card powers, and they are all presented in icon form. Once you get familiar with them, there are some general rules and conventions that help you remember what they do. Just that when first time playing, there is a learning curve.  

There is a cycle in how you manage your cards. You will keep playing and buying cards until there are only a few left in hand, and then you will do a reset. You keep repeating and tweaking this. You will adjust your hand of cards by abandoning some cards (playing them early in a cycle with no intention of claiming them back) and buying new cards. You must deck-build and make your hand more efficient. Here you have more control than a conventional deck-building game, because you don't random draw from a deck. You have all your cards in hand. 

You play cards to collect money and resources. You spend money on new cards (and some other things). You spend resources on construction. Construction often gives you points. There is high player interaction. No direct aggression, but often there are limited opportunities you need to grab before your opponents do. The keyword in this game is organic. You are building Faiyum together. How it develops is entirely up to player actions. You must pay attention to what your opponents are doing, in order to find the best opportunities. Some cards which are not purchased will be permanently removed from the game, augmenting what players can do as a collective. If not many people can build settlements, then those cards which score points based on settlements will not be very useful. If many players are building homesteads (farms), the card which generates a lot of wheat from homesteads will be more reliable. 

Card powers depicted using icons

In our game no one bought the bridge building card and it was removed permanently. The result was we had no bridge except for that starting bridge at the bottom right. This affected some of the scoring cards near game end. Since the two banks were not connected, some cards which scored based on the largest connected network were less powerful. 

Roses (the first resource above) are the wild card resource. The other two resource types here are wheat and stone. The rectangular tokens are money. 

This particular monument is now complete. It requires only three slabs. 

These are the four disaster cards which trigger game end. Some have point values. If you are early in exiting the game, you can claim one of these. When the game end is triggered, you may no longer do reset. At most you can play out all the cards still in your hand. 

The mummy card is used for scoring points. Circle means points. 

These were my cards by late game. The older ones are those abandoned. 

The Thoughts

Faiyum is one of my favourite new-to-me games in 2023. I wonder whether it's because I have a soft spot for Friedemann Friese. I always say a good game should bring something new to the table. I don't enjoy many of the currently popular heavy Eurogames because they seem to be doing the same thing over and over, under different settings and artwork. Yet Faiyum seems to be just another one of these. It is about collecting resources then spending them to build and score points. The deck-building aspect is something a little different, but not exactly something completely new. So why do I like it so much? I enjoy how organic it is. It reminds me of Le Havre. There is a general outline to the story, but player actions will collectively steer the game. You have to watch what your opponents are doing, and you play a part in modifying the arena of play. I enjoy this player interaction. Developing Faiyum is a group effort. You do have to rely on others, and you try to use them. Everyone is using one another. You have to do it more efficiently than your opponents to win.