Faif

Date played: January 10th
Platform: PC browser
Session fun rating: 6/10

What a strange little game this is. I played Faif, a browser based tile combat game against AI. The concept is really cool. A grid, some gems, hearts, swords and skulls with each player taking turns. You must select 5 adjacent tiles then the system picks one of those for you to play. A heart restores health, gems provide cash to buy upgrades, swords deal damage and skulls hurt. When the turn is over, the five tiles disappear from the grid. The trick is, the more skulls are in your selection, the harder you hit with the swords, creating a really interesting gambling scenario. At first, I struggled a bit, but I found my strategy pretty quickly.

I ended up keeping the weaker opponents alive while I was farming gems with them, then purchasing all the upgrades, starting with the hearts upgrades. That meant I was able to build a decent pool of health, shielding me from pretty much every opponent after it. By level 18, I had broken the game, sitting at 108 hearts (you start with 5), more gems that I could ever spend and a slow battle of attrition against stronger opponents. It got boring, but that first 30 minutes was fucking great.