Fantasy Realms Review – The Most Gratifying 20 Minutes of Math You’ll Ever Have

I reviewed Red Rising a while ago and although I enjoyed it, it felt bloated. Like there was a smaller, better game within it. Well, it turns out Fantasy Realms by Bruce Glassco is that game.

Like Red Rising, Fantasy Realms has you command a hand of seven cards, and on your turn, you can either draw a card from the face-up market or the face-down deck. Afterwards, you need to discard a card face-up to the market.

However, unlike Red Rising, there are no other mechanics.

Just get the best hand of cards you can, and score the most points.

While that doesn’t sound too satisfying, the cards in Fantasy Realms are broken into 10 different suits. Each card has its bonuses and drawbacks based on other cards in your hand. For example, the Dragon card has a base strength of 30 points, but if you don’t have a Wizard card in your hand it’s worth -10.

There’s so much of this back-and-forth combo-ing, that deciding which cards to keep and which to give up has as much drama as a high-strung sorority party. If you invite Kurt, you need to invite his girlfriend Bianca. But then Serena won’t go if she knows Bianca will be there, and her dad is your dad’s boss.

On account of this drama, figuring out who to invite to your party, or which cards should stay in your hand, becomes an ultra-fascinating problem.

Making a Card Stock Stew

Playing Fantasy Realms is like grabbing all the ingredients from your fridge and putting them into a crockpot to make a tasty soup. It doesn’t matter how good you are at soup making. If your ingredients consist of chocolate, tomatoes and fish. It isn’t going to taste very good.

Likewise, in Fantasy Realms, you can’t make a good hand of cards, if good cards never appear. You’ll improve at seeing and making combinations over time, but you’ll always be at the mercy of the card draw.

This is where a lot of the excitement and fun comes from. As you’re often given the worst cards you’ve ever seen, and then spend the next 10-20 minutes turning them into a beautiful point-scoring hand of cards.

It’s an incredibly gratifying experience, but also an isolating one.

Whereby you only interact with other players through the open market. And with everyone’s hands hidden, you rarely know what cards are in play. So instead of being able to make informed decisions about what cards to take, and what cards to add to the market based on what other players are collecting. You more often than not interact with the market with the same style and grace as Homer Simpson with a time machine.

For instance, in the last game I played, I added the Bell Tower card to the market – as it was only giving me 8 points (because I gave up my wizard a turn earlier). Unbeknownst to me, the Bell Tower was the exact card my wife needed to turn her Candle card into a 102-point monster.

Had I known that, I wouldn’t have discarded the Bell Tower. But such are the highs and lows of Fantasy Realms.

The Best Way to Score Isn’t With the Scorepad

The one negative about Fantasy Realms is the same negative I’ve lobbed at other games like Imperium Classics. Which is the downright awful end-game scoring. Because you’ve spent the last 20 minutes building tightly knitted combos, to score them you have to unravel each combo one at a time.

Which is a lot easier said than done.

Thankfully, a couple of mobile applications can handle this for you. I used one called Fantasy Realms Scoring, and it was fantastic. It comes with a card scanner allowing you to point your camera at your cards and it will enter all of them into the app and score them for you. Although there is also the official web app as well, it’s just not as good.

These applications save Fantasy Realms.

I would not be half as excited about this game as I am without them. As this is a very quick game, without these applications you’d spend more time calculating scores than playing – no thanks!

Overall, Fantasy Realms is a simple game with one mechanic, but that mechanic is refined and excellent. The combination of building and swapping and trading of your hand is so immeasurably fun that you’ll lose yourself in a world of what-ifs, and calculations.

This is the same mechanic I spoke of highly in my Red Rising review, but it’s even better in Fantasy Realms. While not being weighed down by extra mechanics on the side.