Playing the haul from Spiel!

Magic Fold is a traditional race to the end of the board game for 2-4 players that takes about 20 minutes.

It is the 3rd game in the Fold series and I believe debuted at Spiel 2018. Magic like its predecessors (including Battlefold described earlier in this project) its core mechanic is driven by folding a piece of cloth so that only certain key symbols are shown.

It’s a very traditional game aimed at getting your magic carpet to the palace before your fellow wizards. Snakes can waylay your path and set you back, and shortcuts can help you move forward.

Whereas Battlefold generally added complexity and depth to the original mechanics, in many ways Magic fold is a simplification. The addition of a time limit is definitely a good improvement to stop incredibly long turns when a couple of players just can’t figure the fold out (it only starts after one player has solved a pattern, so it only kicks in once at least one person is sat around waiting). The fact you have multiple options for puzzle matching (one for each action token) this time means you can pick something a little easier and still get a win. This is a good improvement in the sense that whilst it still gives a bigger reward to the faster puzzlers, it’s not so black and white a penalty as in previous games, being an ok puzzler can still give you a bit of progress in this game. The provision for the game to be played entirely with an easy deck of puzzles, or with a harder deck is again a nice improvement to adjust difficulty. The genie tokens you pick-up which act as wild cards again help balance out the skill difference between players, especially as you receive one when you fail to match a puzzle. This catch-up mechanic and everything else here makes it potentially the most kid-friendly Fold game yet.

We picked it up because Fold-It we loved (primarily for its innovation, though the main puzzle solving mechanic very much appeals to Amanda). Also, Fold-It was expensive and difficult to get hold of in Europe if you hadn’t got it at Spiel, so we didn’t want to take that risk with this. That and the deal that included Battlefold made it an obvious purchase for us, even if in the final evaluation I don’t think it will see much use.

There is nothing much wrong with this game, but outside the fold mechanics, it really feels like a very traditional family board game from decades gone by. For me, that doesn’t really appeal. We have played it once, and its not been something we have wanted to suggest to our friends, given the other games available.