CINEMATIC SHOWCASE! And a Review of Fort by Leder Games.

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Now, today's game is a little game called Fort. So this is not a sponsored video or anything, but Leder Games did send me a free copy to review. Now in Fort, you are back to being a kid, unless you're eight, nine, 21 and younger, and watching this video, then you're still a kid.

The goal in this game is to relive childhood, any pizza, play with toys, hanging out with your friends and build the biggest and best Fort there is. Now as you're doing all this fun and cool stuff, you'll rack up victory points and by the end, naturally, the most victory points is the winner.

Now, as always, let's start off first by starting with what I think the game can improve on. The game does start off a little bit slow for me. I think the progression system, to start off with, is a little bit slow, now you can combo off and get tons of toys and pizzas early on, but in terms of victory points, you don't gain them as quickly.

Now, you will gain some victory points here and there. But with that said, even with that slow start, once you start increasing your Fort level, all of a sudden the pacing gets really, really fast. It goes from one point to three points and nine points automatically, as you go to like Fort level three and four and so on.

So the pacing goes up really, really fast, and that compensates easily for the slow start in the beginning. And that, seriously is the only thing I can think of, in terms of what I think Fort can improve on because it's such a fine tuned, well thought out, cohesive game overall.

Now in terms of artwork, cover has this unique style that really defines what leader game is, because it's so cool and it's very distinguishable. My favorite part is definitely the logo of Fort itself because it shows all of this wear and tear for my kids kinda being clunky and just funny little stuff that kids would do and make.

And I think the sign alone makes the game really cohesive both in terms of the artwork and the components. The colors, the logos, the symbols, all mesh really, really well together, across all the components in the game. And speaking of components, player boards are my favorite components in Fort.

Now these double layer player boards feel really, really nice. You have slots for all of the resources and for forward progression. Now for me, I think it would have been, a little nice touch if they put a backpack shape instead of the square-rectangle shape that they did.

But that's obviously personal preference, not a big deal. I just think it would have added a nice little flair. Cards are very smooth. They're super easy to shuffle even without sleeves. I love the resources tokens. I mean, come on, you see these little mini pizzas and toys and how can you not automatically be interested? And lastly, let's talk about overall game play.

So here's the thing with Leder games. They have these games that look deceptively simple and they're not. And that is a great thing because that's what makes these games so incredibly re-playable and so much fun to play. Now from a first glimpse, first look at Fort, you think it's a relatively simple deco there, but in fact, there are so many more mechanics that gives such a big twist of the game, like the way player interaction is incorporated.

Now, when you play a card, you have to think about whether it's worth it to use that public action that everyone else can follow and copy. You have to really think about the card that you're playing on your turn, then all of the actions that you'll be using, because all of a sudden you're just like, wait, how do I make progress, without having everyone else make the same exact progress? You can take cards from other players every single turn, but then you also have the park which has a set of three cards that you can also take from as well.

So the choices that you have to make from playing a card, to recruiting cards, to putting cards out in your yard, to picking cards from the park, they're just so many factors involved and that's what makes this incredibly fun to play. Now with that said, there is a ton of play interaction in this game from you stealing other people's cards, from your friends stealing your own cards, to you, being the leader, playing an action on your turn and other people following your action if they want to.

Now, there is one other thing that I wanted to mention and it was a question that I had when I was playing the game. And that was, if everyone is following or if everyone has the capability to follow the leader's actions on their current turn, how do they define their own progress if everyone is doing the same exact action? Or more specifically, how do our victory points start to differ if everyone is scoring the same amount of victory points from the same multi actions from following the leader? And that is where private actions come into play because those actions are specific only to you.

And you have the option of using the public and private action on your turn. On top of that you have made up rules, you have perks, you have the macaroni sculpture. Those are just some of the ways that you can zoom past other players. And on top of that score, even bonus victory point at the very end.

There is a good level of mystery because even if your points are readily open to everyone to see on their victory point track, you still have these mystery points that you can score at the very end. So you won't really know who's actually going to win, especially if it's a tied race.

Last thing I wanna mention, Fort is very very dramatic deck builder, if you don't end up hanging out and playing with your friends, they can leave you to go to other people. You can make more friends by going to the park. The naming and artwork of cards totally immerses you in this giant playground.

And this whole kid like theme from made up rules, this first player card, they have all the nicknames and personalities for each and every friend. You know, your best friends never leave you, how symbolic of that? You know, I thought that was a very cool, and very difficult way actually, to synchronize artwork, components, mechanics, overall gameplay.

Oh, it's such a fun and highly re-playable game. Plus it comes in a very small child funny package and I can easily see our group taking this along for our travels because it's a credibly fun game. It is deceptively simple, difficult to master, and overall and invite a ton of creativity for managing what cards you play every single term.