Fischen / Fishing First Thoughts

Friedmann Friese's fishing game has had some buzz. I got a chance to play it.

I heard quite a bit about Fishing (Fischen) when it first came out, but only got a chance to try it for myself at my local games group this past week. I really like trick-taking games anyway, but something about this one has me hooked - and I won’t even excuse myself for the pun.

The basic idea for the game is pretty simple. You play tricks in the time-honoured way, with the highest card winning. Any cards you win go on your fisherman card, and at the end of the round you score a point for each card in that stack. So far, so formulaic. But from round two onwards, things get really interesting.

You see, your winning stack of cards gets shuffled and turned into your own personal draw deck for the next round. So you might have won loads of cards, but you’ve now got a handful of low value cards. If at any point you try to draw a hand and don’t have enough cards, you draw the excess from a central deck. A deck with increasingly powerful cards. The cards not only have higher values than the starting cards, there are also special abilities in there. You can take a card from the trick even if you lost it, or force everyone to pass a card to their left, even call the colour of the next trick even though you aren’t leading.

There’s this lovely tug-of-war going on where you want to win tricks to score points, but if you don’t win too many tricks you get to draw more powerful cards. Do you want to win tricks then, or lose them on purpose? The answer is a bit of both, and it’s wonderfully engaging.

I’ll reserve judgement until I have my own copy and get a few more plays under my belt, but for now I think it might even be my favourite card game of the year so far. Keep an eye out for it, and if you’ve already played, let me know what you think of it.