Fortune & Folly

In Fortune & Folly, each player manages their own trading house in a fantasy world set roughly in the Elizabethan era. Grow your trading company by commissioning new ships and direct your fleets to win monopolies on key trade routes and harbors in a race to be recognized as the Queen’s Royal Trading Company!   SUMMARY: Fortune & Folly is a worker management game with a rich nautical theme and very approachable rules. Event cards are drawn each turn and serve the dual purpose of normalizing game length and driving strategies that become more complex as players get more comfortable with the ecosystem at work in the game’s mechanics. But getting into the adventure is easy. You start with three ships and move them between harbors and routes to score points based on the price of the goods moved over that route. Winning harbors allows you to place more ships and grow your fleet. When the last event card is resolved, the player with the highest score wins!

GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW: Players start with a fleet of three ships on the board and can grow their fleet to ten by commanding monopolies on the harbor islands. Use trade ships to claim trade routes and gain Fortune points and direct pirates to harry your enemy company's efforts. Players will plan and then take each step of their turn with the help of their turn order card which includes a step to choose a world event card. Three of these events are shown next to the deck, so you'll have three shown options during this phase, or you can choose the top card of the deck at random. Once there are too few event cards to replenish the four options, the current player takes their turn and game is scored. Whoever has the most Fortune wins!

Each turn you will: 

1. Draw and resolve a card
2. Move a ship to a route or harbor island sharing a way point  3/4) Optionally, you may get to make additional moves, or move pirate ships around
3. Score points for routes you monopolize 
4. Place new ships for each harbor island you monopolize

ATTRIBUTES: There are four dice, but they are used as counters for commodity prices.  There are always the same number of turns because of the number of World Event cards and there's a mechanic called the Royal Court card that is used to speed up games that start to run a little longer due to players' deliberating more over their turns.   The World Event cards present the only real randomness in the game, but you'll always have four options (including the option to pick a card at random).  A strategy guide is included in the rule book, so you can really hit the ground running.

Designer Notes: This game is meant to be super easy to get learn, even for those just getting into the hobby, but to introduce layers as you become familiar with the mechanics. You'll be carefully planning your move and thinking like a shrewd trade company manager in no time! This game was developed over the course of almost two decades and we're so proud of how it turned out. Many thanks to Erwin Arozza for his contribution of stunning artwork that we think really brings the rich nautical, sometimes piratey, theme to life. We hope you'll have as much fun playing fortune & Folly as we do!

—description from the publisher