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Fit To Print: Read all about it!

By Meeple Lady | October 25, 2023 | Comments 0 Comment

This review of Fit To Print is featured on Episode 140 of The Five By. Check out the rest of the episode, which also features Legacy of Yu, Sea Salt & Paper, Flamecraft and Rise.

As someone who started their career in the newspaper world, it’s rare to see a board game with that exact theme. So, when I saw the Kickstarter for Fit to Print, I immediately backed it. When it finally arrived on my front door, like the morning edition of the daily paper, I was so excited to get the game on table, to see if this tile-laying real-time game captures the essence of what it’s like to assemble the front page of a newspaper before the time runs out.

Fit to Print, designed by Peter McPherson and with charming woodland creature artwork from Ian O’Toole, co-published by Flatout Games and Alderac Entertainment Group in 2023. It plays one to six people, in about 30 minutes. It’s a fast-paced and hectic puzzle (in the funnest way possible), the perfect game to squeeze into that small time frame when you’ve got a game day deadline. See what I did there?

In Fit to Print, players take on the roles of editors-in-chief assembling the front page of the tiny town of Thistleville’s newspaper to be balanced with news stories, photos and advertising. All of these items are represented in over 130-plus unique block tiles, which are placed in the middle of the table face down. The game goes through three rounds: Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with each subsequent newspaper front page getting larger.

Time to assemble the front page! Deadlines matter here!

The rounds are split up between the reporting phrase and the layout phase. Players can decide before playing if they want a frantic, standard or relaxed game, with the timer set at 3 minutes, 4 minutes or 5 minutes for the round. When gameplay begins, players simultaneously flip over tiles in the middle of the table (with one hand one at a time) and individually select which piece to add to their cardboard desk, and when a player decides they have gathered enough tiles to fill their front page, they move onto the layout phase of the game (all the while the clock is still running in case you forgot) and lay out tiles on their front page board. And yes, each player gets a cute little cardboard desk you assemble and take down with each game.

The whole setup for my front page, complete with a little cardboard desk.

How you place these tiles matters on your board as they’ll score points at the end of each day. News stories come in three varieties: sports and entertainment, news, and business technology, respectively pink, blue and green tiles. Articles also come with moods: good news or bad news. The same types of tiles do not like sitting orthogonally next to each other. Photos want to be separated from other photos, as well as ads. The exception to this is news stories. You can place different types of stories next to each other, but you won’t score any points for placing business stories next to each other.

Just like real life editorial design, you want to maximize your space, and if you are unable to perfectly piece all the elements of your front page (or worse, didn’t get enough tiles to fill the space, which happens all the time), you’ll be penalized with negative points. The person with the largest continuous white space will receive the biggest penalty. Alternatively, if you take too many tiles, you’ll also get negative points but luckily, you’ll have them on your desk to publish in tomorrow’s front page.

Players also begin with a centerpiece, which has to be placed anywhere above the fold and covering the star printed on the board. The centerpieces offer different ways to score points if you meet their qualifications. Photos score points for news stories it’s adjacent to. You also want a balanced front page. Too many sad stories vs happy stories, and you’ll be docked points. Lastly, ads give you revenue, which will be added up after three days, and the person with the least revenue goes bankrupt, goes out of business and is ineligible to win.

One of my best front pages! Look at how few open spaces I have!

Fit to Print also comes with advanced modes such as player powers and adding a breaking news deck, which places unique restrictions and bonuses for the day. The rulebook also comes with a family mode to reduce complexity, as well as a solo mode that comes with scenarios to track achievements. Lastly, the game also comes with rules for a newsroom mode, which supports 4 to 12 players in teams of 2. Within each team, one player is the reporter and the other the layout editor, and teams are spaced apart around 12 feet. I haven’t tried this yet but I can imagine the frenetic chaos of the reporter picking up tiles from a centralized table.

So how does Fit to Print stack up? It’s so freaking fun. That polyomino puzzle is a mechanism many of us are familiar with, but amping up the gameplay with the real-time aspect of it — genius! Every time I’ve played it, I like to yell out things like “30 seconds left” during gameplay, to which someone inevitably yells “Shut UP!” and a few other colorful words that I won’t be repeating for our family-friendly podcast. Once that clock starts for the round, the excitement fills the room and everyone is hyperfocused on picking up pieces to collect on your little cardboard desk

Fit To Print has been a hit every time I’ve played it.

Sometimes your eyes are bigger than the allotted space for your front page. But then Sunday rolls around, and that extra space somehow exponentially makes A1 so much harder to fill up and fill it up well!

One of my friends described it as Galaxy Trucker with the misfortune of having your ship getting blown to bits. Here, you just scrap your front page after scoring your points and get ready for the next day’s edition. And the game’s artwork is just so cute and the characters endearing. I have a fondness for Boris Erenstein, the grizzled news reporter who started out as a copyeditor and has 20-years of journalism experience behind him. He looks like the type of guy who would make deadlines, even if you have just three minutes left. If you love real time tactile puzzle games, Fit to Print is for you.

And that’s Fit to Print! This is Meeple Lady for The Five By. You can find me on all the socials as Meeple Lady, or on my website boardgamemeeplelady.com. Thanks for listening. Bye!

Lisboa: A Masterpiece from Vital Lacerda

By Meeple Lady | October 29, 2018 | Comments 2 comments

This review of Lisboa was featured on Episode 46 of The Five By. Check out the rest of the episode, which also features Mr. Jack, Lords of Waterdeep, Apocrypha and KLASK.

Lisboa is a game published by Eagle-Gryphon Games, designed by Vital Lacerda, with gorgeous artwork from Ian O’Toole. It plays 2-4 players, and even though the box says 60-120 minutes, my experience is it plays a little bit longer than that with maximum players.

Before we begin, Lisboa is by far one of the most complicated games I’ve ever had to teach, learn and play. In real life, rules explanation can take about 30 to 45 minutes. So if heavy games are not your bag, feel free to skip ahead five minutes. I totally will not be offended.

Lisboa is gorgeous, from outside the box to the game itself.

Lisboa is beautiful, crunchy and has a little bit of everything that a heavy gamer like myself enjoys. The game has area control, set collection, card drafting and tile placement. And probably most importantly, you get to decide your end-game scoring conditions.

The purplish-blue board game, whose color scheme is reminiscent of the Portuguese tiles the city is known for, is set in 1755, when Lisboa was struck by many natural disasters: an earthquake, fires and a tsunami, pretty much leveling the city. And now we’re all tasked with helping the city recover economically. We are taking turns to clear rubble, build ships and sell goods, get permits to construct public buildings, and set up shops so that the city can prosper. And we all want wigs. Lots and lots of wigs, which are VPs in this game.

The board is divided into two main parts: one side shows all the actions you can do on your turn, and the right side is filled with rubble and street locations for storefronts and public buildings.

The right side of the game features the city of Lisboa, where players are tasked to remove rubble, and build storefronts and public buildings.

What the game boils down to is its multi-use cards, and players picking from one of two actions with those cards from their hand of five cards. You can either tuck the cards into your portfolio, or play cards into the royal court to meet with the king, prime minister or master builder. These two main actions, either tuck or play, however, unlock a spiderweb of many, many other actions.

If you decide to tuck a card, you receive the reward or penalty for tucking that card. And then the card either gives influence for later or some permanent ability. You then can sell goods on an open ship or trade with the nobles, which will require goods. There are four goods in the game: gold, cloths, books and tools. Each noble wants a specific type of good, but all of them will take gold. If you trade the nobles, you can perform two different state actions if you meet the required good for that particular noble.

There are six different state actions you can choose from: recruiting officials (which you place on the board and will affect how other players meet with nobles), acquiring a plan (which you need to build public buildings), building a ship (which gives you influence and wigs when people sell goods to your boat), producing goods (if you have a storefront on the map), meeting the cardinal (which gives you Clergy tiles and benefits), and getting royal favors (which allow you to follow someone’s noble visit).

If you decide to not tuck your card, but instead play a card, you can visit a noble or gain the benefit from the treasury card. To visit a noble, you have to pay influence, and depending on who you visit, you can build a store (which is calculated by the rubble left at that intersection), take a decree card (criteria that will score you wigs at the end of the game), or open a public building (which requires to you already have a building permit of the same color in your possession and workers on the board).

Here are a few of the decree cards that score you VPs at the end of the game if you fulfill them.

As more stores are built in the city, it becomes less expensive to take that action because the rubble slowly get cleared. Rubble cubes are randomly placed at the start of the game so at the intersection of each storefront location, the price is calculated based on how many cubes are still there and which color, with beige being the most expensive and blue the cheapest. When you build, you remove one cube, and then pay the cost of the remaining cubes. And this is how you can collect sets of rubble on your player board, which will then unlock more spaces for cards to tuck and progress the game.

Also, when you satisfy the requirements and build a public building, you then gain the rubble the public building will sit on, and then if there is a storefront along that street where the public building was just placed, then the storefront scores VPs. In all, a storefront can score up to three times, if public buildings are placed on the north, east and west sides of the board.

So after you either tuck a card or play a card, you carry out the actions that correspond with the tucking or playing, and then you take a card from one of the face-up piles and your turn ends. The game is played out over two identical periods. The first period ends when someone collects two sets of rubble or three of the four piles of cards are depleted. The second period ends when someone collects four sets of rubble or three of the four piles of cards are depleted as well.

Lisboa manages to keep other players engaged even when it’s not their turn. As with other Lacerda games, there’s an option to follow another player’s main action. At the end of the game, you score any decrees you’ve collected, the various streets are scored according to who has the most storefronts on that street, and you a couple other items such as ships, influence and money.

I love teaching this game, especially when I have the giant tweezers with me!

The interconnectivity of all these actions is what I love most about Lisboa, which I believe is a masterpiece. Each action isn’t difficult per se, but there are a multitude of microsteps that need to first happen in order for you to do something large like, build a public building.

And that’s the super quick overview of Lisboa! This is Meeple Lady for the Five By Games. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as meeplelady, or on my website, boardgamemeeplelady.com. Thanks for listening. Bye!