Review Summary: A very clever concept translating into solid mechanics. Will it stand the test of time?

Blurb from the publisher: 'You are a thief, always on the lookout for the next target to hit. You decide to sneak into the Royal Palace, break in its treasure room, and look for the mythical treasures rumoured to be hidden there. Among piles of gold, emeralds, and precious jewelery, you stumble upon a chest containing a mysterious hourglass. As soon as you touch it, you are filled with mystical energy and realize its true power: You are now able to see glimpses of your own future. By taking different courses of action, different paths unfold before you, allowing you to shape your future as you see fit. Unfortunately, everyone in the palace is now after you...

A Thief's Fortune is a card-drafting, engine-building game in which each player represents a different possible future of the same character. By visiting different locations, interacting with local characters and making sure that certain events you have seen actually happen, you try to find the path that will lead you as far away as possible from danger.'

What you get: Your EUR 37,99 or equivalent will buy you A Thief's Fortune, the card-drafting, engine-building game that can accommodate from one to four players in anything between one and two hours.

In addition to the 16-page English rulebook which can be downloaded from the publisher's website free of charge, the game also contains the following: 51 Location cards, 57 Character cards, 63 Event cards, 12 Starting cards, 7 Solo Achievement cards, 4 Player Aid cards, one Solo Player Aid card, 3 Deck Indicator cards, 32 Sword tokens, 32 Gem tokens, 32 Lamp tokens, 26 Time tokens, 36 Danger tokens, one Game Board, 8 Separator Boards, one Starting Player wooden token, 4 Scoring wooden markers, and one Round wooden marker.

Gameplay: The players incarnate the same (!) thief taking different courses of action in the near future, in their effort to produce the best possible outcome for him. The game lasts five rounds. The player with the most Fortune points at game's end is the winner. To accumulate those a player counts all the Fortune points indicated on the cards in his 'past' area. Fortune points are also awarded for every five basic resources (swords, gems and lamps) a player has remaining in his stockpile.

At the beginning of the game each player starts with a random starting location. Each location is linked to a different character, e.g. the Desert hands you the Traveller, while the Alley gives you the beggar. These two cards are placed at a player's 'present', while the player also claims the indicated resources (one Time, at this point).

Each player has three areas in front of him: his future, his present and his past, with all movement going from the former to the latter. Cards placed in the future should have on them the resources they indicate. As soon as they stop having resources on them, they move to the player's present. There are no limits on card capacity for the future. The present however cannot hold more than four cards of any type (i.e. four locations, four cards, and four characters). When a card is moved to the present, it occupies the leftmost space on the row. When the row gets filled, the leftmost card is pushed out of the present, all cards move to the left, and the new card is placed on the rightmost space. The past also has no limit when it comes to card capacity. Cards placed there should be kept in a single, face-up pile. A player can always consult his past, yet his opponents will only see the top card.

The game is played in five rounds, each consisting of four phases.

During the Planning phase, each player draws a Location, a Character and an Event card, as well as two more cards of his choice, for a total of five cards. Each player then simultaneously reveals a card of his choice, and places it on the relevant row in his future, along with the resources it indicates. Players then choose and secretly give two of their remaining four cards to the player next to them. The process repeats itself until the players have only two cards remaining in their hand. Then, each player places one of these two cards in his future, this time however he also profits from the one of the two Favour bonuses that are indicated next to the card he did not play. That card is then discarded.

The Loot phase allows a player to bring resources from their future to their stockpiles one at a time. Danger tokens are always placed on the player's 5-space Danger Track. Each round dictates how many resources a player can claim in this way (from 5 to 7, as the game progresses). A player is allowed to pick less resources than the round's maximum. As soon as a future card hosts no more resources, it should be moved to a player's present. When doing so, it may trigger abilities on Location cards already in the present, which should be immediately resolved.

In the Action phase a player may execute one or two actions on their turn: activate a character, activate an event, spend time, and pass. The first allows the player to choose a character in the present and perform his ability. As an example, the Woodcutter adds two swords in a card in your future, while the Monkey gives you a gem. An activated character is turned sideways but remains in the present. The activation of Events works in the same way. These are more complex: Living on the Edge will give you points if you fulfil aDanger token prerequisite, while Bad Luck gives you points at the expense of saddling you with Danger. An Event moves from the present to the past after its activation. By Spending Time (two Time, to be precise), a player may move one resource from his future to his stockpile. If he empties a card in this way, the card goes directly to the present. Passing is obvious: as soon as a player does so, he is finished for the round. The first player to pass will be the starting player for the next round. The phase continues for as long as players wish to take one or two actions, and ends when all of them have passed.

The Bribe phase is about paying a bribe based on the Danger tokens a player has on his danger track. Each Danger token will cost the player one basic resource, and does not leave the danger track. Thus the bribe is only about temporarily averting danger. If a player cannot pay the bribe, he loses Fortune (victory points in other words) for each Danger he cannot mitigate. When however that happens, the Danger that the player lost Fortune for is removed from his track.

The rulebook also includes rules on timing and what happens when actions are triggered simultaneously, strategy tips about resource management and combo creations, as well as an FAQ for 12 different cards. The game can be played solo with only minor adjustments. The player tries to achieve a randomized goal (out of seven) in either normal or hard mode. Examples include scoring 45 Fortune and having at least 10 Characters or Locations in your past, while the hard version would be 55 Fortune with the same number of Characters or Locations.

The strong points: Artipia Games definitely knows its drafting games, Among the Stars: Revival and Fields of Green being fine specimens of the genre. Thankfully, the design of A Thief's Fortune is nowhere near derivative or a reskinning of another game. Card-drafting (a mechanism that at times I find problematic overall) meshes brilliantly with the engine-building aspect (a mechanism that I profoundly enjoy). The idea behind future, present, and past is game design at its finest. Consider it a three-tier process, where, in order to put things in action at the second tier (the present) and create the combos that will ultimately make your engine move, a player will first need to relieve his cards of their resources. This might not be as easy as it sounds; the resources that you accumulate might not be what your engine actually needs as fuel, especially when it comes to combo creation. One needs to balance the efficiency of his device against the feasibility of his plans, and even more so when what destroys your engine and brings cards in your past is also what awards you points. Also don't forget that in order to reach that part, one must first draft, and we all know how cards disappear left and right when knowledgeable gamers are given cards to choose from.

It must however be noted that this is not a blind draft from the same deck. Each player chooses the decks for some 40% of his choices. Whether the cards are good or bad is irrelevant; he will be forced to immediately pass 40% of that choice (or 50% of the cards he is holding) to the next player. This makes choices meaningful, rewards thinking players, as well as showcases the difference between newer players and those more experience who have an idea of what to aim for. The favour bonus from the non-drafted card is also great design. Which are the cards that are left at this point? The ones most players consider useless. Yet suddenly these cards get a second chance to shine, to produce something constructive. The game could have been a bit more strategic if someone could have retained a card from the beginning of the draw to the very end for the explicit purpose of using it for the bonus, but this would have required a whole rethinking of the planning phase.

In case it wasn't clear up to now, your combo-oriented game engine is a continuous work in progress. As soon as it works, it gets destroyed, for you to rebuild it again. Thus, turn after turn, you try to optimize what is on the ground with the cards you receive. It feels a bit like football; a tiki-taka style requires extreme athleticism and unparalleled control and discipline from the team's players. If you don't have such players, you can't play that way. Idem here; you build upon what you already have, with the materials that you manage to appropriate before the other players. You will never have everything you want, thus there is no reason to worry about absolute optimization, but about doing your best with what is at hand.

Even though there are easier engine-building and card-drafting games out there, I found the game easy to understand. It shouldn't take more than twenty minutes to explain the rules to a new player, even though the devil is in the details. I do recommend playing a couple of open rounds first, especially if the concept of card drafting is unknown to some of the people around the table.

The solo rules are enjoyable; depending on your familiarity with the game you might opt for the easier or harder objectives. I do not mean this disparagingly, but the ease with which such an otherwise competitive game translates into solo play demonstrates also why it strongly feels as a multiplayer solitaire, or at least why some of its aspects do. Keep on reading.

The production values are high. The game has many elements, even though many of them like the cardboard tokens are mostly identical. The art is modern, and could have easily been a part of an Arabian-themed comic.

The weak points: I have nothing bad to say about the game. Its mechanisms carry all the strong as well as the weak points one is likely to see in other games: card drafting can be tedious and slow unless timed. This is also valid for engine-building. Some groups might face analysis/paralysis issues, others might not. To a large extent the game feels like a multiplayer solitaire due to the absence of actual knowledge of what your opponents are doing; you are bound to concentrate mostly on your board after all, and with all that text on the cards the chances of you following your opponents' moves closely are not that high. This can only be mitigated by continuous play, and that only to a certain extent. That having been said, a strong memory and analytical capabilities are always an asset.

Just because the game has a thieving theme does not mean that it is a freeform exercise. Mostly it boils down to exchange this for that, and if-then-else equations. I have no problem with this. I wasn't however expecting something more, like an exception-based game. If you are, you will be disappointed.

The cards try to emulate the pseudo-Arabian feel of the game, with jewels and embroidery as decoration, they unfortunately however come out as busy. Many a time I caught myself looking at decorative elements, pondering on whether they were a pictograph with an in-game effect. I would have opted for a more streamlined approach.

At times the game feels fiddly. I would have also opted for substantially different background colours on the game's resources, so that their existence or absence on the board is much more pronounced.

No matter what his future, the thief is going to steal all the available space from your table. The game might not boast of gargantuan miniatures or of a billion elements, but damn, these cards in different rows with a dedicated space for each part of the timeline are really demanding.

Something went patently wrong with the printing of the cards, at least in my copy. The image on 28 (!) of them is not cut straight, both on the front as well as the back. No game-related elements are omitted, thus there are no issues when it comes to recognizing what the cards do. However these 28 out of 51 cards are permanently marked since their back is different to the backs of other cards. Thankfully, Artipia has a great customer service, and I have already received proper substitutes. I am not docking any points for this; it can happen to any company. The important thing is for mistakes like it to be corrected.

Conclusion: A Thief's Fortune enters a saturated market, yet it brings quite the novelty with it. The mechanics are fresh and well-implemented, with the theme tightly linked to the crunch that makes the game what it is. I don't know how easy it will be to find amongst the barrage of games that get published year after year. If you are even remotely interested in these mechanics however, and want to control somebody's future, you should give it a try.

For more info on A Thief's Fortune and Artipia Games visit them at http://www.artipiagames.com.

Shameless plug: for more gaming news and content (including, for example, pictures of A Thief's Fortune that I am unfortunately not able to upload on RPG.net for the time being), and to better keep track of my reviews, subscribe to my Antonios S facebook and twitter page.