26 May 2025
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Fairy Ring is a board game where you’ll need to use towering stacks of mushrooms in devious ways to score as many points as possible, and we think you should play it.
Written by Chris Lowry
Playing Fairy Ring Game
There’s an unusual mechanism at the heart of Fairy Ring; each player sets up cards in a line in front of them, and that line forms a figurative ring around the table. Each turn you will move your Fairy token a number of cards to the left—once they leave your row of cards they immediately land on the right-most card of the player’s row next to you.
So all the Fairies are constantly circling around the table, permanently connecting your personal tableau to the wider game. I’m used to card laying leading to solo-puzzle style games, and Fairy Ring turns this on its head.
Each of the cards you place down has a different colour of mushroom, with different point-scoring mechanics. The purple “Magidrome” mushrooms have a simple point score every time they are landed on, whilst the pink “Academy” toadstools gain points based on how many spaces a Fairy moved before they arrive. The blue “Spring” shrooms are particularly interesting; they don’t score points for their owners if a fairy lands on them, but they do if one jumps over them. This has the effect of creating a “safe” space in the middle of an opponent’s row to land on without adding to their score.
As the game progresses, players stack cards to make taller mushrooms that score more powerfully; in early rounds you might earn two or three points; but at the end, that can be twenty-five or more! Collecting points is open knowledge, but you can trade them in to secretly increase your score wheel, adding a sense of mystery to casual games.
Since selecting your next card is done blind—before everyone reveals their own—there’s potentially just enough strategy to feel satisfying; “if I move six spaces now, I’ll miss their purple one, and land on the yellow one, which will activate my yellow card…”. In reality, this is only of much significance in the two-player game, since the variability of so many new cards being added at higher player counts is hard to counter with the limited options in your hand.
Fairy Ring Review
Under repeat plays, it definitely felt like there were some weaknesses; denying your opponent’s points with the blue “Springs” also denies you points, so landing on them is very rarely a sensible decision. In several games, I didn’t get the option to build some of the types of mushrooms I needed, whilst my neighbour had them in spades and reaped the rewards.
Is this an intense player-vs-player battle? No, absolutely not, but nor does it feel so random that players lack agency either. Fairy Ring offers a light-weight mix of planning and surprises that my family and I found charming. It doesn’t hurt that the artwork by Maud Chalmel is bright and lovely, with well-designed plastic flower point-tokens and transparent Fairy standees. Aside from the pieces that you directly hold and interact with, the publishers have clearly made a real effort to avoid the unnecessary use of plastic, with paper bags, boards and trays. Good work!
Fairy Ring Verdict
You should play this game.
This fungus-laded fun feast is undeniably light-weight, but it’s really rather tasty too. I think it’s slightly better at two players, but you’ll all have fun whatever the player count.
You'll like it especially if you liked Moon. Fairy Ring is faster paced than Moon, and with none of the analysis paralysis that haunts that game, but the feel of being intimately connected to the player next to you is still there. Space is probably more exciting than the forest floor though...
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About Fairy Ring
Designer: Laurence Grenier & Fabien Tanguy
Publisher: Repos Production
Time: 40m
Players: 2-4
Ages: 8+
Price: £32
What’s in the box?
- 66 Mushroom cards
- 4 Village boards
- 4 Fairy standees
- 12 Objective markers
- 4 Score wheels
- 50 Mana tokens
- First Player tile
- 4 Objective cards
- 4 Player aids
- Rulebook