When you first look at Fort from Leder Games, you may think it’s a kid’s game. Technically it is for ages 10 and up, but there is a surprising amount of strategy and theme in this deck-building game. 

Welcome to our review of Fort, where we’ll take a deep dive into what we think about this fascinating game.

Fort – Game Overview

In Fort, you play a kid who simply wants to play with their friends, eat pizza and build a fort. ( I mean, it sounds pretty great, really!) To do this, you can either choose to copy the other players’ actions or strike out on your own and do what you need to do to win. The ultimate goal is to get to 25 victory points by playing cards as the leader or copying the leader on their turn. The game can end if you have built a level 5 fort or run out of kids in the park to play with. 

So let’s dive into this game.

Game Components

This game is highly themed, and the components reflect that. Everything in this game feels like it has intent and purpose towards the theme.

The game contains four player boards, a victory board, wooden player tokens, wooden pizza, toy tokens, and several decks of cards. Two of the decks are rewards for building your fort. One is hidden until the end of the game (The Made-up Rules), which you get once you’ve upgraded your fort to level 1. The other is a Perk, a unique ability you have once your fort reaches level 2.

The main deck of cards is divided into six suits also themed to the game (Book, crown, shovel, glue, squirt gun, and skateboard). Most cards also have two actions on them and a fun illustration of the kid’s nickname. We’ll get into how this comes together in the Gameplay section, but the quality of all the components is quite good. We particularly like the player boards with multiple inlays and spaces for your toys, pizza, backpack, and fort level. There is also an excellent cutout for you to store a card or cards in your fort’s lookout.

There’s not much we have to say needs improvement in the components. They are all excellent and beautifully on-theme.

Game Setup

When setting up for your first game, you need to take several steps. These don’t take too long but are necessary for the game. The setup entails selecting a board along with the two specific kid cards detailed on the back of the board. These two kids are your “best friends.” Then you shuffle the remaining kid cards into a deck that you place next to the victory track. This new deck, called the Park deck, is used to draw eight additional kids into each player’s personal deck, which is shuffled with their best friends to create a ten-card deck. 

Outside of this, the players shuffle the made-up rules cards and deal one card for each player plus one into a facedown pile next to the Victory track. (so a two-player game gets three cards, for instance) This process repeats with the perk cards (1+ # of players), but they are placed face up in a display side by side for all to see. 

Finally, the players take their player token and fort token and put them on the Victory track and fort Level track, respectively. Each player then draws five cards off from their kid deck into their hand, and they are ready to play!

Overall the setup was pretty easy. It’s really just shuffling several decks and collecting your starting tokens. Not too bad!

Game Play

In Fort, you play as kids trying to have fun, get pizza/toys and build their fort. 

Game play overview

One player is the leader in each round, and the rest are followers. The role of leader passes between the players for each round. 

Leader’s Turn

• Play a card.
• Playing a card is where things get interesting. Each card has a suit on it (as mentioned above). Most also have two sections (a public and a private action) with symbols in each action. These symbols represent actions you can take, like take a pizza or toy or copy what someone else has on their board. 
  • Some actions have an X modifier that allows you to add more cards of the same suit to the action card you play. So, for instance, if you had an action that required a squirt gun, you could add an additional squirt gun card from your hand or your lookout. 
  • The leader can take both the public and private actions on the card, which needs to be completed fully. In contrast, the other can be completed fully, partially, or not at all.
  • Follower’s turn: all other players can copy the public action on the leader’s card, just like kids copy each other in real life. They must put down one card of the same suit and complete the action fully. (If you have a single space for pizza but the card lets you take two pizzas — you can not take that action)
• Recruit new kids to join their posse. Recruiting entails taking a card from the park, the park deck, or anyone’s yard (including your own). 
• Discard all played cards, best friend cards, and recruited cards into your personal discard pile. After discarding those, cards left in your hand get placed into your yard for other players to collect during their recruit step. 
• Draw five more cards into your hand from your personal deck, shuffling the discard pile if you need to draw up to 5.

Finally, the leader becomes the player to your right, repeating all those steps as now they are the leader. 

When it gets back to you as the leader, the only other thing you do is start by clearing your yard to your discard pile.

So what did we think of it?

Well, it’s a pretty engaging game. Some cards have no public action and only a private and vice versa. Having one or the other makes it difficult for your opponents as no one will follow you and copy your action (or conversely, you won’t have a private action). The key also is to be able to complete actions “fully” As the leader, you need to be able to complete one of your two actions fully, as mentioned above. 

The other cool thing about the game is “trashing cards.” At first, we thought that removing cards from the game would make it more challenging to play. Still, we realized it actually makes sense thematically. For instance, if you and your best friend had a falling out, you may want to “trash them” Not very nice, to be sure… but in the game, sometimes necessary (see Loner Make up Rule — you must end the game with no best friends to gain extra victory points)

So why are you collecting pizzas and toys? Because when you play a fort+ card, you can spend those items on upgrading your fort. When you get to a level 5 fort, the game ends with you getting the “macaroni sculpture,” which gives you additional victory points. 

Overall impressions

We really enjoyed this game. We loved that the game’s theme is throughout, and there is never a question about why you are doing something. We’ve played some games recently where the “why” was missing. Like “why am I getting a ruby in Quacks of Quedlinburg?” for instance. Not a bad game, but Fort feels like everything is done to keep the theme. We were really impressed with the player boards and the indentation areas to place the wooden makers. Too many games provide you a space to put tokens on, but they don’t chorale the pieces very well. They’ve done an excellent job with this.

As per tradition in our reviews, we mention one thing that “Could be better.” This point was a tough one with Fort because the game was excellent. That said, we’d love to see more expansions for this game. We know the Cats & Dogs expansion is supposed to be great but have not played it yet.