Just for some context, I love Fable. The world of Albion has been a highlight of my gaming life for many years, and for all its flaws I can’t help but admire its wonderful, grounded, and often funny, fantasy world drawn through the lens of rural England. As someone whose taste in literature is made up largely of Terry Pratchett – Anne McCaffrey and Tad Williams are pretty good too – Lionhead’s world spoke to me in a way that few others have done.
I was therefore probably one of the few that lamented the passing of Fable Legends. I’d played it at events and during the beta, and while I readily admit that it wasn’t close to being finished, there was still something there. Probably a good portion of that was the setting and the characters therein, which sparkled with a lot of the same Fable magic as we’d seen before. So, perhaps Fable Fortune will serve as some small consolation, bringing us back to Albion via a competitive card game, crafted by the same hands who’ve been at the tender all along.
It’s worth noting at the outset that Fable Fortune immediately has an uphill battle, and that’s very much thanks to its competitors in what has become an increasingly crowded genre. Back in the day you probably only had to worry about the digital version of Magic: The Gathering, but now you’re going to toe to toe with Gwent, Elder Scrolls Legends and the apocalyptically huge Hearthstone, which takes some serious gumption.
So it’s perhaps a little disappointing to find that the framework is recognisably that of a standard CCG. You select from six deck types – Alchemist, Gravedigger, Knight, Merchant, Prophet, Shapeshifter – the lead character of which has some pleasant Fable-ness about them, before taking up arms against an online opponent. Beginning with four cards in your hand, you draw a further card each turn, also acquiring gold which you spend in order to play these cards. Each successive round sees the total gold at your disposal increase, allowing you to play increasingly powerful cards.
And so each card, some of which play host to immediately recognisable Fable characters, and some of which… don’t, has a cost, as well as a number for health and for strength. Each card may then also have a special ability or effect, whether that’s to add strength to other cards or to deal damage in a different way to your opponent. If you’ve played any other, fantasy-based card game in recent years, it ‘s likely it will come fairly easily to you.
That’s not to say that it doesn’t offer anything different, and besides some of the Fable flavour there’s the return of the alignment system, which allows you to follow either a dark or a light path as you progress through a game. At the start of each game you choose your path, and then try to perform the miniature quests on your path to either end of the scale. These could be using your hero power four times or playing a number of high value cards. Each time you successfully complete a quest you get to choose from either a light or dark bonus, and you can gain up to three of these in the course of a game. Certain cards can then be altered depending on your alignment if you’re good or bad enough.
Currently in Early Access, you can get an immediate taste of what’s in store for for the game, with two events that you can take part in, alongside a very basic training mode. At the moment there’s PvP Season 1 in the Rosewood, and a Co-op Challenge 1 which is known as Nostro.
While the PvP online mode is fairly self explanatory, the co-op option is relatively unique in the genre, and it’s clear that Flaming Fowl and Mediatonic have put some serious thought into how to set themselves apart from the crowd. It sees you team up with another player against what is essentially a boss character with their own bespoke deck, and you have to collaborate in order to take them down.
So what you have is two decks at the bottom of the screen, and you each take your turn before the Big Bad. If you’re playing with friends then communication is simple, but if you’re playing with a stranger there’s a good chance you don’t want to talk to them – who knows what uncouth things might be said – so instead you can ping cards in their deck to show them what you think they should do, and vice versa.
Of course, you don’t have to listen, and neither do they, so if you’re on the wrong wavelength things can become pretty frustrating, but then that’s true of any game where you rely on others. It’s certainly different, and working collaboratively really puts an interesting spin on things, but I don’t see it becoming as popular as the straightforward one on one
When you win, or indeed lose even, you gain card packs, and specific cards with which to flesh out your deck – particularly good if you’re playing as a necromancer, if you catch my drift. Card packs contain five random cards, and as with so many similar games Fable Fortune ensures that’s there’s a little drama as you open them. You’ll probably be a little sick of opening packs once you’ve waded through the twenty you get for buying into early access.
Building your own deck is nice and easy, with the ability to save eight custom decks, and once you’ve spent a little time with the game you’ll have plenty of options available to you. It’s great to move beyond the canned starter decks and tailor things to how you’re playing the game, and increasingly interesting to take them out and see how they perform. There’s always room for improvement though, and Fable Fortune makes it easy to tinker until you’ve got things just right.
As free to play CCGs go, Fable Fortune has clearly had plenty of attention lavished on it, and it has the benefit of being outfitted with a beloved franchise to boot. It’s great to see familiar faces like Balverines and Hobbes, or Annoying Gargoyles for that matter, but I’ve still come away from my time with it hankering for, well, more Fable. One of the biggest aspects of the Fable games is the humour, and there’s just not enough of that here, so as it stands it feels a little dry. It plays a great game of cards, with enough of its own flavour to stand apart, and you could easily plough hours into it without feeling hard done by. Having said that, there’s still work to be done for it to earn the Fable name it’s so proudly carrying.