I haven't thought much of Friedman Friese's past games. Falsche Fuffziger was a processional bore, we aborted Wurcherer after glazing over during the rules, and I still haven't cracked the shrink on Foppen. But Frisch Fisch broke the losing streak.
Frisch Fisch has production values somewhere between professional and garage shop. The gameboard is a grid printed on folded, laminated card stock. The building and road tiles are cut from the same stock. Wooden coins and colored cubes are included in compliance with the German Gaming Deforestation Act, and a set of four metal rings complete the ensemble.
This is a tile-laying game with a difference— and that difference is a biggie. Frisch Fisch plays with the concepts of negative space and implied structure. Grappling with these concepts requires a different kind of mental gymnastics than what most people are used to. And that's why the game is so refreshing and intriguing.
The board represents a city; the grid divides the city into plots of land. Four factories (fish, gasoline, nuclear power, and games) are dispersed around the board. Over the course of the game each player acquires a matching outlet for each factory and tries to form the shortest possible route to connect the matched pairs. But that process is a little indirect.
Players have two options each turn. The first is to claim a vacant plot of land. The claimed plot is marked by one of a player's colored cubes. Early in the game players will be claiming plots nearest to the various factories. Spaces diagonally adjacent to factories tend to be the best (early on, at least), since they offer two potential connection points the minimum possible distance (1) from the factory.
Players will eventually run out of their limited supply of cubes and will be forced to choose the second option: drawing a tile. The tile deck includes all the outlets shuffled in with generic buildings. If a player draws one of the latter , he must build it on one of his reserved plots (reclaiming his cube).
If an outlet is drawn it is sold via an in-your-fist auction to the highest bidder who doesn't already have that type of outlet. The buyer immediately places it on one of his reserved plots, leaving his cube behind to mark it as his own. The current player keeps taking turns until he places a cube or a building.
Nothing exciting so far, but here comes those mental gymnastics I was talking about. The city requires that all its roads be connected, and that all outlets and unbuilt plots have access to a road. Roads are never voluntarily built— they're only built thanks to the implicit results of other construction. The construction of a building or outlet can mean that certain spaces must become streets so that existing streets, outlets, and unbuilt plots can remain connected to a single unified road network. Such plots are immediately converted to roads. If a player had previously claimed one of these plots it is expropriated by the city (eminent domain, you know) with no compensation for the player (although he does get his cube back).
Pretty wild stuff. And pretty clumsy in practice until players gain experience at recognizing required expropriations. Expect to miss a bunch your first couple of plays. It's no one player's responsibility to find them, though, so having each player examine the board helps reduce the error rate. This is a game which would benefit tremendously from a computer implementation. Still, repeated play does make it easier.
Your score (low is better) is the total length of your best 4 routes minus your remaining cash. This leads to the game's most serious problem (aside from the contradictory rules). Cash plays far too great a role in scoring, deemphasizing the value of good routes. Our winners usually have the most money left over, not necessarily the best routes. This is tweakable— say, by dividing leftover cash in half— but it shouldn't need to be.
Frisch Fisch was made in a small print run and may be hard to get your hands on. Try. It's hard to wrap your head around at first, but the innovative use of negative space makes for an engaging game.