Fancy Feathers

Lately, I have been looking for clever pocket games that hold up well at two players. I am already tired of losing to my son at Radlands, while Mum does not often honour us by sitting down for Fishing — which, to me, remains the king of trick-taking. In that search I came across Fancy Feathers: a small bird game with a fairly kinky idea at its centre.

Its core is a very strange drafting system. Your choices are not simply “take the good card and move on”; they follow an unusual flow that makes you watch what is in circulation and what might end up with the other players. This is where the game truly comes alive, and it is where almost all of its interaction sits.

The problem is that each game uses only six of the twelve available birds. That mix seems to determine, to a large extent, whether the draft produces meaningful, irritating decisions or whether the session turns into a bit of a mess. With three or four players — which requires a second copy — I imagine the process becomes much more killer, because there is more pressure and more interest in what you leave behind.

At two, though, I was not left with enough beyond that one clever idea. Fancy Feathers is strange in a good way, but it is not reliably interesting: when the right bird set does not do its job, I find myself looking at the draft and thinking, “Lovely, and now what?” In general: meh.