Fading song - Fastaval

by Martin Bødker Enghoff & Tine Bonde Christensen

Help a flock of Regent Honeyeaters survive and recall their fading song. In Australia, the Regent Honeyeater is a critically endangered songbird in a vanishing habitat. With no one to teach them, the young birds forget the mating song of their forebears. In this memory-based tile placement game you will steer your flock towards food and away from danger, keeping them and their unique song alive.

Presentation

  • Time: 120 min
  • Players: 2 – 4
  • Language: Danish/English

The players each play a flock of Regent Honeyeater songbirds, who strive to recall their unique song and build the best habitat in an environment under increasing threat from human activity and natural enemies. This happens by drafting tiles into a face down tableau, that is later revealed to score points based on the patterns created.

Tiles are drafted two at a time from shared piles of tiles with good symbols, like nesting places, songbirds, and food, as well as bad symbols like nest predators and competing species of birds. The piles have different conditions for how the tiles are placed in the habitat, representing how far the birds travel to find what they need. Will you draft safe tiles, close to home, where you determine where they go or reach for an attractive tile further away where the other players can affect their placement?

The key here is that tiles are drafted face up, but placed into the habitat (of 4x4 tiles) face down. Players must thus try to remember which tiles were placed where, like the Regent Honeyeaters must remember their song.

When all habitats are finished, players take turns revealing their tiles, trying to match the different symbols to specific point-awarding patterns of nests, birds, food, and of course the song of the flock. If a bad symbol is revealed a negative effect occurs, such as tiles swapping places. Importantly, players do not have to reveal all tiles, but can stop at any time. Are you sure where you put that annoying Noisy Friarbird who disturbs your birds’ mating calls or is it safest to stop revealing tiles even though there could still be good tiles left?

This sequence of drafting and revealing repeats two times, with the available tiles getting progressively worse, to symbolize the decline of the habitats due to human development. Players also get to place fire in other player’s habitats to represent the deadly bushfires that ravage Australia.

During the game the players should get a feeling of the challenges faced by the Regent Honeyeaters trying to survive and recall their song in a world that disappears around them.

About the designers

Ever since discovering The aMAZEing Labyrinth as a child, Tine has loved playing games. Recently she combined that with her fascination for fish, reskinning Wingspan with more than 200 unique fish cards. 

Martin started making games at a young age, co-designing a Heman and My Little Pony themed roll-and-move with his parents and sister.

Tine’s first question to Martin was if he knew Bohnanza and their second date was playing board games in Utterslev Mose until it became too dark to see the cards.

Now they have teamed up and are going to Fastaval for the first time for Tine and approximately the hundredth for Martin.

Kasper has played board games for more than 40 years. As a science librarian he loves to deconstruct games and scrutinize what makes a game bigger than the sum of its parts. He favors strategy games with historical settings. Kasper first Fastaval board game design “Witch Hunt” won an Otto for best board game and was published as “Pagan: Fate of Roanoke” in 2021.