Calling all brave adventurers! Grab your sword, shield and pointy hat, because monsters have overrun the land and you’re here to stop them – for that sweet sweet public admiration of course. It’s time to step into the otherworldly fantasy realm of Fame & Fable!

👥 2-4 players
⌛ 45-90 minutes
🧠 14 years+

Click here if you want to skip the gameplay details and go straight to our thoughts.

Gameplay:

In Fame & Fable, players are competing to be the best monster-slayin’ champion in the realm. Recruit allies and purchase items to thwart the monsters that roam the land and gain fame and glory – and mess with your competitors for good measure. If you think you’re hard enough, face off against the most powerful legendary beasts in a bid to score the most fame and become the most admired hero the land has ever seen!  

Each turn, empty spaces on the centre board are filled to show monsters, a marketplace of allies and items and ‘contracts’ (basically objective cards to try and complete on your turn). You start with three actions, but you can get additional bonus actions if you’re lagging behind on the fame score track. What you do on your turn is completely up to you – as long as you have the action points needed (don’t worry – some things in life are free!):

• Recruit allies or items into your hand: costs 1 to 3 action points, depending on how much the card(s) cost.
• Deploy allies from your hand to the table in front of you: free!
• Draw a monster or legend to battle: 1 action point per monster
• Exhaust allies to use their basic attacks in combat: also free!
• Exhaust allies to use their traits: 0 to 3 action points.
• Play items from your hand (single use): free!

Each ally and item has a unique trait. Some can be used in monster combat (e.g. a stronger attack than a basic attack), some can be used to build your party (e.g. drawing cards from the market), and some can be used to mess with other players (e.g. killing one of their exhausted allies, or stealing cards from their hands). The more powerful the trait, the more action points it will likely need.

When you draw a monster to battle, you pick either one of the face-up monsters on the board, or take a gamble and draw the top card of the monster deck. Or take an even braver gamble and draw a legend (super strong, super scary monsters!). Each monster/legend card has a fame value: this is how strong your attack needs to be and also how many fame points you get for defeating the monster. Most of the monsters also have traits, and they are mighty inconvenient for heroes! Like being immune to certain attacks, summoning more monsters, and exhausting/discarding your allies – or even turning your allies into the monsters they once hunted!

If you defeat a monster: yay! Move your player token up the fame track based on its fame score and gloat about your impressive victory! For each undefeated monster left at the end of your turn, one of your allies earns a shallow grave and is sent to the discard pile.

Once you’ve finished your actions, it’s time to check the current contracts. They vary in type and difficulty, and the more you can complete in one turn the better. . As expected, the trickier the contract, the more fame it’s worth. 

If you pass or end your turn on a ‘moon token’ space on the fame track, you take the nearest moon token at the end of your turn. This is great news, because in future turns you can choose to spend an action point to discard a moon token and ready any exhausted allies you have in play. The not so good news is that whenever you take a moon token, all other players get to ready their allies instantly for free. You also reveal a new Moon card event, which stays in play until the next one is drawn – these can be good or bad!

Oh, and one more thing…if you’re unlucky enough to end your turn on a legend symbol on the fame track, you have to draw a legend from the top of the deck and keep it (face down) until your next turn, when you have no choice but to combat it. As your notoriety grows, you also draw the beasties attention, so the chance of landing on a legend increases the further you get on the fame track.

The game continues until someone passes 100 on the fame track (or 50 for a quicker game). Everyone else gets one more turn, then the person who defeated the most legends gets 10 extra fame points. The player with the most fame wins is dubbed the ultimate Champion and becomes the most fabled hero throughout the lands!

Solo mode – The Trial

We don’t normally comment much on solo modes, but we did have a chance to try the solo game in Fame & Fable. And it’s deserving of its own section because it’s a whole game in its own right!

In the solo game, you’ve already been named Champion – been there, done that, got the t-shirt soaked in monster blood. But those monsters, they keep a-comin’! So, the onus is on you to travel the lands and keep those monsters at bay. Can you survive the trial long enough and reach the end of the champion track, or will the world become overrun with monsters?

The solo mode has a different board with 6 different locations. Most locations have their own spaces for monsters and a market, except the Shadow Realms (just monsters) and the Citadel (just a market).

Each turn, you reveal a Fate card, which directs you to draw from specific decks (monster, ally, item) and place them face down in specific locations. Then, you pick a location to visit and reveal any facedown cards in that location, and follow these three optional phases in order: buy from the market, combat monsters, buy more from the market.

Now, the tricky bit: each location has 3 action spaces max. But every time a monster (or legend) is added to a location, one action space gets blocked off! If three monsters are at a location, no actions for you! But you can still combat monsters (combat is free in the solo game), and if you succeed you free up action spaces to use. You also get to move the champion token one space up the champion track (regardless of how much fame the monster was worth!).

But, if a 4th monster is placed at a location, that location is overrun and can’t be used for the rest of the game. Going forward, if a fate card tells you to play a monster into that location, it spills into the next location instead. If you can’t place a monster anywhere, you lose!

The Citadel is a special location. There are no actions, but you can ready ONE ally and take any of the cards from the market into your hand FOR FREE (you don’t need to pay their normal costs!). You can also spend one action point when at another location to add a card from the Citadel to your hand.

Like in multiplayer, you still get moon tokens from the champion track to ready your party (in solo this action is free!), but they are few and far between. Monster/legend spawns also increase the higher you get up the champion track. If you make it to the end, you win!

Our thoughts:

You can see it, you know what we’re going to say: Fame & Fable is gorgeous. The high contrast illustrations give the game serious table appeal and draw you into an otherworldly fantasyland Owen Davey (as artist AND designer) has created. The designs are unique and breakaway from more stereotypical fantasy artwork. Art in this genre can sometimes lean a little on the fanservice side when using women, so we particularly appreciated how respectfully Fame & Fable presents the allies across all genders: as the strong heroes they are. The little snippets of flavour text on the cards were a nice touch as well.

You can see it, you know what we’re going to say: Fame & Fable is gorgeous. The high contrast illustrations give the game serious table appeal and draw you into an otherworldly fantasyland…

But even more importantly, the game plays brilliantly. From adding the coolest allies to your party – an ongoing endeavour in a world of beasties! – to risking everything when you draw a monster blind from the deck, Fame & Fable is a fun, thrilling game of pushing your own luck and messing with your mates. I’m terrible for taking the gamble over the safe bet so often I drew a monster from the deck, and it more often than not bit me on the bum – but I would still do it all over again next turn! (There was a hilarious instance where a friend drew a monster, that called more monsters, that called more monsters…..). And we loved how the game builds: things start slow as you pull together your ragtag team of allies to take out your first monsters, but by the end you’re confidently (or desperately) attacking as many monsters and legends as possible to get those delicious fame points.

One of the mechanisms particularly liked was the mechanic that gave people behind on the fame track a lil boost with bonus actions (known as ‘catch the leader’ according to Board Game Geek!). For each empty moon space between you and the leader, you get 1 extra bonus action. That, and getting to ready your allies when another player collects a moonstone, help to not feel too behind when another player is doing well. 

There are a few allies and items that let you mess with other players, but we found this didn’t happen tooooo much so it felt more playful than aggressive. That might be down to our play styles (we aren’t the most aggressive players anyway) and what cards came out in the game. I imagine in a 4 player game more cards would come out and you’d have more player-on-player action.

Fame & Fable is a fun, thrilling game of pushing your own luck and messing with your mates.

With all the different decks in play, there is inevitably some luck to the draw. Some luck is fun, like the risk when drawing a monster. But some luck can be a bit irksome, like seeing easier (or repeating) contracts come out in another player’s turn, and watching them complete them all with ease and jump ahead on the fame track. But this is part of the fun with Fame & Fable, and the luck can swing in an instant. In one game Matt managed to travel a third of the fame track in one turn! But I still managed to catch up and win the game from behind.

With regards to learning Fame & Fable, even though the gameplay is fairly straightforward, it did feel like there was a bit of a learning curve. The well-laid out rulebook goes some way to help, but there’s too many thematic terms to wrap my head around. Some people will love this style because it makes the rules more immersive/narrative to the game setting; I just have a preference for plainer language when learning a game.

Something that helped with learning (and teaching) Fame & Fable was realising that some elements of the set up feels similar to Hogwarts Battle: both have a central market of allies and items, and there are public enemies to defeat. The gameplay itself is obviously different: rather than working together to take out common enemies, you’re competing against one another to take out the monsters first. And instead deckbuilding like Hogwarts Battle, Fame & Fable is all about optimising your hand and party of allies in front of you. Still, I found the comparison useful for getting my head around some of the rules, and teaching them to Matt, so maybe the comparison is helpful for you too!

Now down to some slight niggles we found. The symbology was easy to pick up, with the exception of one of the attack types (weapons) that uses a sword symbol. In many other games, a sword is often used to symbolise attacking in a more general way, so this caused confusion a few times with us and with friends.

The other niggle was that while the box has lovely designated compartments, we found it didn’t take much movement for cards to slide under the separators. Every time we opened the box there was a bit of a faff to retrieve trapped cards. As we were using a prototype, this may change with the final product.

Finally, I want to touch on our first impressions of the solo mode (we played together, like a co-op!). We were amazed to find the solo mode felt a completely different game, rather than simply an adaptation of the multiplayer version. Our playthrough felt really hard and punishing, and we didn’t get very far before losing. It was more gruelling than games we’d normally choose to play (I don’t tend to like games where you’re expected to lose), but it’s clearly designed to be a challenge to come back to again and again, which is surely appealing for people who play solo regularly. I can see some houserule options that I’ll probably try next time for an easier game (e.g. adding the option to spend actions to refresh markets, or being able to ready more than one ally at once at the Citadel).

What works well:

• Brilliantly designed high fantasy game with a unique, visually appealing style.

• Fun push-your-luck gamestyle with a bit of cheeky player interaction (without being too aggressive).

• Smooth gameplay that really builds momentum in the endgame.

• Amazing, challenging solo mode that is a different game in it’s own right.

What doesn’t work as well:

• Occasionally the luck of the cards can feel a bit unfair (particularly in solo mode).

• The use of a sword icon to mean a specific attack type, rather than attacking generally, caused confusion from time to time.

Final verdict:

I fell in love with Fame & Fable when I first saw the artwork online over a year ago (pre 2024 UK Games Expo!). So my love for this game feels like a forgone conclusion. It’s fabulous! The artwork is so distinctive, and really brings a sense of uniqueness to the characters, allies, and monsters – without following any fantasy stereotypes.

Owen Davey, the illustrator and designer behind this wonderful beast, has really outdone himself with a fantastic debut game!

It was initially tricky to get our heads around the rules, but once we had the gameplay was smooth and I can see it being a fairly accessible fantasy game to introduce to my family. The way your luck can change in a turn – whether you’re far behind and luck out by completing all the contracts, or a leader who takes on one too many monsters – makes it feel risky and exciting. 

Owen Davey, the illustrator and designer behind this wonderful beast, has really outdone himself with a fantastic debut game! *chefs kiss* Truly, well done.

So, do you have what it takes to become the next fabled hero? If so grab your weapons and magical thingamabobs, because Fame & Fable is still live on Kickstarter!

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This deluxe prototype was kindly loaned by Owen Davey via the UK Board Game Review Circle. All opinions are ours and our reviews are always honest.