Introduction and Overview
Forgotten Floofs is currently funding on Kickstarter and we were able to get our hands on an early prototype version of the game.
In this tabletop game the world has stopped loving their furry guinea pigs. Humans have been enslaved by Cat Overlords, and now the world is no longer safe for guinea pigs. Now, they have formed factions and fight against each other for resources to build new homes for themselves. You play the role of guinea pig tribe leader — making decisions and helping your homeless floofs find a place and home in this dying world.
Through bidding on and managing resources, as well as surviving against catastrophes, you will ensure you have the most housed guinea pigs at the end of the game. Many, many guinea pigs will die, but hopefully you can keep enough alive to repopulate the world.
Components
This game consists mainly of cards. Each faction has a leader card which shows what you can purchase with various resources. The five factions also has 30 floof cards each — these are your homeless guinea pigs. There are also resource cards; wood, rope, stone, cloth, wild, and dynamite, and building cards: prison, temple, mine, town house, and hospital. Apart from these cards, there are two smaller decks — one of miracle cards and one of catastrophe cards. After all of those cards, there are 3 tokens for each of the factions.
Turn Structure
Now, turn structure is quite unique in this game. Instead of having each player take their own turn, most turns happen all at the same time in rounds. The first round is drawing cards until you have up to five guinea pigs in your hand. You can see the strengths of these animals and they will be what you use in the following phases. Then, a bunch of resources are laid out in the middle of the table. You can use your tokens to bid on up to three resources. These tokens represent one of your guinea pigs. If you don’t have three guinea pigs, you cannot place all three of your tokens.
Once everyone is happy with the placement of their tokens (as players can move them around until everyone is happy) you need to pick the guinea pigs that you want to fight after each resource you have selected. The person with the most strength (total, in all of their cards if they have more than one) ends up with the resource. Every guinea pig that battles does die — adding to your ever growing graveyard. Unless you have a hospital, in which case your creatures can go there — or if you have a prison, the enemies creatures can be captured.
After the fights have concluded — you are then able to start building by trading in your resources for buildings. There is a limited number of each building and as there is no real turn structure, you are going to have to say what you want before others claim the buildings you need.
While we are at this phase, let’s talk a bit about the different buildings. We have covered prisons and hospitals already (though it is worth mentioning they will need some staff — your own guinea pigs) but there are also temples which hold a few of your creatures as well as give you a miracle card which has a single use upon building it. There are townhouses, which home a few of your floofs, and there is also mine — which hold a couple of workers and provide you with an additional resource each turn as long as they have the max amount of guinea pigs inside it.
After your buildings are all set, you can start putting your own creatures either from your hand or blindly from your homeless pile into the various buildings. On their cards, they explain how many guinea pigs are needed and what happens if they are occupied. Each full building is worth two additional points (while each floof is worth one) at the end of the game.
The final stage is the catastrophe. A random bad thing will be flipped over, forcing you to kill a set number of your floofs. You can either do this from your hand or by blindly picking from the top of the homeless pile. Once the creatures have fallen, you will restart the turn cycle again.
Two actions can happen outside of the different phases: dynamite and miracles. As long as you have guinea pigs in your hand, you can bomb other faction’s houses — destroying their buildings and pets inside of it. Once you have run out of guinea pigs that need homes, you are no longer able to bomb people or be bombed yourself. Miracle cards can also be played whenever they are relevant to your strategy as these cards can do a variety of things including bring back some of your pets, effect other people’s bidding, or let you peek at your homeless pile.
Game Experience
As Forgotten Floofs is in a very early prototype phase, I did find that there were some improvements which could still be made. Once you get started, bidding on resources and keeping up with the phase structures is super easy to follow. There is a lot of strategy to be had to the buildings you create — as some of them really do help you tons. The different factions also start with various buildings depending on who you pick.
I did feel that there were a lot of death cards and miracle cards — far too many even when playing with 5 players. Currently you only get miracle cards if your hospital is full or the first time you build a temple. I feel that you should also get miracle cards once your temple is full of floofs on the start of each phase when you get resources. Without regular miracles you very quickly start running short of homeless floofs, which means you start bidding less on resources, which means you cannot build the means to get miracles to revive your floofs. All of our creatures were dead long before we even got a third of the way through the apocalypse and miracle cards.
I also found that having to make quick decisions (because there is such a limited amount of building cards was a setback), as I got to the point where I couldn’t build what I wanted and didn’t have bombs to get the buildings I wanted back into the game.
With that said, the game is super fun to play — collecting and battling over resources and trying to claim what you need during a strange guinea pig apocalypse is awesome. In its current state, the artwork as well as names and descriptions of each pet is wonderful. The death cards and miracle cards are so funny, and bring a lot of lightheartedness to a game so full of death.
Conclusion
Forgotten Floof’s prototype is a very good start to a complex, yet silly game. Once you get into the process of trying to make sure your faction comes out on top, you start really getting into Forgotten Floof. I quite enjoyed my time playing the game — especially with more players. There is just enough randomness to the death of your crew to add a lot of challenge and feel balanced, although the game definitely needs some tweaks before it goes to print.
I am certainly interested in where this game goes — and I really would like to challenge my friends again and see if this time my faction can prevail!
At the moment, Forgotten Floof is on Kickstarter for just a few more days – so if this sounds like something you’d like to play, consider backing them. You can also follow their Twitter @ForgottenFloof or their Facebook.
A copy of Forgotten Floof was provided for review purposes. You can find out more about Forgotten Floof on the website of publisher Toasty Ghost Ltd.
