Fredericus is a peculiar tactical game of monster hunting by Eligio Cazzato, released by daVinci & Mayfair games.
Players: 2-4
Time: 45-60 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
The Components
Fredericus comes in a small box containing:
- 1 board
- 8 falcons
- 4 betting tokens
- 118 cards
- 1 rulebook
Board: A small octagonal (!) board, printed on textured cardboard. It's very simple, depicting a castle with 8 sides, 8 keeps, 8 towers, and (you guessed it) 8 courtyards. It's plain but entirely utilitarian.
Wooden Bits: 1 large rectangular piece (the high falcon), 1 small octagonal piece (the low falcon), and 1 disc (the betting token) in each of the four player colors (red, yellow, green, blue). Overall, good quality German wood bits. There's enough height difference between the high and low falcon pieces that it's always easy to remember what is what, which is good.
Cards: 118 cards printed in color on plain, medium-weight, half-size cardstock. This includes 48 landscapes (which depict woods and skies), 8 emperor's seals, and 32 mythological creatures (in 8 different types), together comprising the main deck. There's also a goal deck of 24 cards (which again show those creatures), 1 Fredericus card, 1 Starting Player card, and 4 Falconer cards. The art on all the cards is nice, but not spectacular. The monsters all look like colored pencil work while the other cards look computer generated.
At start it's a bit overwhelming trying to sort through all these card types. This is made more difficult by the fact that there's not much contrast between any of the different card backs, and the mythological creature cards and the goal cards look almost identical (only the orientation is different). A bit of work could have made setup easier. However, once everything gets laid out it's a lot easier to keep track of what's what.
The main deck of cards, which is laid out in rows around the tower, helpfully has a small icon in two corners on each card, which makes it easy to see what's coming up.
The falconer cards are nice, because they exist solely to remind you what color each player is. Whenever a game doesn't have a way to identify a player, I find that to be a bit of a pain.
Rulebook: A black & white multilingual rulebook in 5 languages, including English. The rules are just 4 pages long, and includes lots of examples and illustrations. I find a lot of daVinci's rules tiring to read, but these ones were very clear.
Overall, Fredericus' components are fairly average: nothing bad and nothing amazing. It earns a "3" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Fredericus is to accept the most goals from the emperor, capture the most monsters with your falcons, and generally try and ensure that your captures meet your goals.
Setup: The castle is laid down. Each player chooses a color and his falcons are placed on the castle, opposite each other. The 64 seal, landscape, and monster cards are shuffled, then laid out face-up around the castle, with a row of 8 cards eventually abutting each of the 8 sides of the castle.
The goal cards are shuffled, the Fredericus card is shuffled amongst the bottom four, and then each player is given an initial goal.
(With fewer than 4 players you need to do all sorts of gymnastics to remove some of the cards.)
Finally each player places his betting token in front of one of the 8 towers (in the "keep"), marking where he thinks monsters will be captured.
Order of Play: During his turn a player must take 4 actions from among a menu of 3 possibilities:
- Move Card
- Move Falcon
- Hood Falcons
During these actions, creatures can be captured and seals can be opened, each of which gives players victory points.
Move Card. The player moves a card from the end of one row to the end of an adjacent row.
Move Falcon. The player moves one of his falcons from a tower to an adjacent tower.
Hood Falcon. The player "hoods" all of the falcons in one tower, moving them back into the courtyard. This may only be done if there is a woods card at the end of the row to the right of the falcons and a wood card at the end of the row to the left of the falcons. All of the falcons belonging to other players in the space are hooded, except each player may only have one of their falcons hooded at a time.
Captures & Seals: The point of the card & falcon moving in Fredericus is (ultimately) to capture monsters or open seals. These are free actions.
Capturing Monsters. If you have one of your falcons in a space, with a monster at the end of the row it's in front of, you might be able to capture that monster. If it's your low falcon, there must be a woods card at the end of the row to one side of the falcon and a sky card at the end of the row to the other side. If it's your high falcon, there must be sky cards at the end of either adjacent row.
Each of your falcons can only capture one monster a turn. When you capture a monster you take it and place it in front of you; it'll score you points later.
If a player captures a monster in a row where someone else made a bet, that person takes back his bet chip and draws a goal card.
Opening Seals. If one of your falcons has a seal at the end of the row to his right and a seal at the end of the row to his left, he may "open the Emperor's seal". (Clever falcon.) This flips the cards in the row in front of him, so the end is the beginning and vice versa. It also removes one of the two seals.
Finally the player gets to draw a goal card, which will score him points later.
Ending a Turn: At the end of his turn, a player gets to replace his betting token (whether he guessed right or not) and also free any of his falcons that were hooded.
Rather than betting on a keep you can instead bet in the courtyard, which means that you think no one will make a capture, and you win if no one has by your next turn.
Ending the Game: The game ends either when a player captures his 8th monster or someone draws the Fredericus card from the goal deck.The game ends at the end of that round of play.
Each player gets 1 point per goal or monster card they've taken, plus 1 additional point if he matched up one creature & goal, 3 if he matched 2, 6 if he matched 3, etc. (Each one is worth one more than the last.)
Whomever drew the Fredericus card gets 2 points too.
Highest score wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Fredericus is a tactical "puzzle" game, that really differentiates itself from the rest of the genre by the fact that it's so small, quick, and comparatively simple (though it still takes a decent amount of time to play).
Like most games of the type the goal is to figure out your best move on an individual turn. There's pretty much no way to set yourself up for future turns (though you do get a little bit of lookahead by trying to figure out what your opponents are going to do).
Other puzzle games that I've reviewed include Dos Rios, Hansa, and a lot of Wolfgang Kramer's Action Point games.
(Like most tactical puzzle games, this one has action points; you get 4.)
The Game Design
Fredericus is a game that I really wanted to love. The rules read well, and I was itching for my first game. I started playing and, sure enough, it was just the sort of tactical puzzle that I love. There was some analysis paralysis for some players, but the decision tree was relatively constrained, and so it wasn't bad. On top of that there was some great tactics, and it looked like it'd be relatively quick, as I burned through my first monster captures.
Unfortunately all three games I played suffered from a degenerate endgame. Because of those landscapes stuck around as you captured monsters, some monsters ended up buried, and toward the end of the game it became impossible to make a capture on your turn, and it was also impossible to set yourself up for a future turn because of the tight constraints of the board: you'd just be helping out someone else. Two of the three games ended very anticlimatically with us all spending a few turns betting that no one would make a capture, and then collecting goal cards. It was a big flop. The third game we managed to squeak by because one player decided to help out another, a dubious but potentially valid strategy.
This problem does have some potential solutions. They include:
- A variant in the rules which allows you to clear three woods or three skies at the end of a row during your turn. A bit inelegant, but I expect it'll do the job.
- Setting up the player after you in game to make a capture, but ensuring that they can only do so by capturing exactly where your bet token is. This isn't necessarily the best solution for either player, depending on how many creature and goal cards each has, but it is a way to end the game with some benefit going in either direction. It might be that this was intended to be the solution, but it's neither obvious enough nor strategic enough to ever be a good, easy choice.
- Changing the rules so that you discard a landscape whenever you capture a monster, just as you discard a seal when you open those. There could be problems here if you end up with all forests, so it's not a perfect solution.
- Changing the rules to put out more monsters. This is possible in 2 or 3 player games where you usually put away some of the monsters.
We used the in-game betting solution in our third game, and as I said it limped to an end. The other three ideas are untested but possible. Frankly after three so-so plays I'm a bit too frustrated with the game to try any of them.
One other thing of note: some might consider the game chaotic because so much happens between your turns. This is really common for this sort of tactical game, but caveat emptor!
Overall, Fredericus has the potential to be a very good game. Using the base rules as it ships it's nearly a broken game, but using any of the variants I note, including the one that's in the rulebook should make it an average game. Thus I've given it a "3" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Fredericus is a neat, quick tactical puzzle game that breaks down in its end game. Using the variant rule suggested in the rulebook for a "shorter game" should make it a more acceptable play. I wish it, or something else similar, were a default rule so that I didn't have to spend three games bashing my head against this design. If you love tactical games and want a filler, take a look, but be aware of the concerns.
Review Summary