Friday: A Solo Adventure
I’ve had Friday in my game cupboard for over a year now, along with the rest of my pile of shame, and decided that this year will be the year I get round to learning all the games in that cupboard.
Friday, the second game in the Friedemann Friese Series: Freitag-Project (Friedemann Friese), is based on the story of Robinson Crusoe and his loyal partner Friday (Freitag). You play as Friday, and when Robinson Crusoe crashes his ship on your island, your peaceful times are disturbed. You must help Robinson to survive the island and prepare him to defeat the pirates that are coming for the island.
Friday is a solitaire deck-building game in which you optimize your deck of fight cards in order to defeat the hazards of the island. During a turn the player will attempt to defeat hazard cards by playing fight cards from their deck. If defeated, a hazard card will become a fight card and is added to the player’s deck. If failed, the player will lose life points but also get the opportunity to remove unwanted cards from their fight deck. In the end, the player will use their optimized fight deck to defeat the two pirate ships coming for the island, allowing Robinson Crusoe to escape the island and allowing you to finally have your peace back!
Everything I’ve heard about this game felt justified when I started reading the rule books…
Difficult to master, so perfect for a quiet day off to learn it properly…
Contents of the box are:
- 1 Rulebook
- 2 Rule Supplements
- 3 Storage Boards
- 72 Playing Cards
- 22 Wooden Life Tokens
Not much at all and the box is so small it is really easy to transport around to play at lunch, in a coffee shop, in the park, anywhere really as it needs very little play space.
Setting up the game seemed complicated according to the rule sheet but once I watched a set-up video it seemed far simpler, just have to be very methodical. Set up the three boards with the appropriate cards: Hazard, Robinson, and the Aging cards (ancient on the bottom, middle age on the top) then draw your two end game pirates.
You are then ready to start the first of the three game phases: Green, Amber, and Red with the Hazard difficulties getting progressively more difficult with each level. The use of life as a variable resource is different, either to destroy weak cards if you fail a Hazard or to buy Robinson cards if you think you’re near winning. Be careful with this but not too careful.
Getting rid of your weaker Robinson cards is part of the strategy of the game, but this gets harder once you start adding the Aging cards to the Robinson deck every time you work through the whole of the deck, some are really punishing.
I thought I was doing OK here but I kept forgetting to use some of the abilities on the Robinson cards, especially the extra life, but it is going to take more than just this single play through for me to remember all the different abilities and how they work together, just have to keep the games slow and refer to the ability glossary.
I got through to the Red phase in this first play through and only had 3 Hard cards left when I drew an Aging card that got rid of my last two life…
Fun but it really did make my brain itch, looking forward to playing it again now that I’ve finally opened the box and got around to learning the basics.
