Hype is a dangerous thing for a small game. Unless you can rely on an army of fans to interpret even the most obvious design flubs as subversive toying with outdated expectations, word of mouth can quickly overwhelm a smaller game. Suddenly other people’s excitement creates impossible expectations. Disappointment becomes a foregone conclusion. Doubly so, if you had to wait months to finally get your hands on this highly praised game. It’d be a shame if Faraway were to suffer this fate. Because Faraway is a good game.

Faraway is a card game, in which we try to score the most points by playing a total of eight cards. Some of those cards simply give you victory points. Others tie those victory points to a condition (in form of symbols) and yet other cards provide you with such symbols. In the game’s 68 cards you’ll find various combinations of victory points, conditions and symbols. This in itself is neither very challenging, or particularly unusual. What seems like a challenge at first, is the way these point cards have to be played first, before you get to play the cards to fulfil their conditions. Assuming you manage to draft the cards for them. But after a handful of plays, you develop an easy familiarity with the game’s flow and structure. What seemed to be the game’s unique selling point, is really just another way to use card drafting to structure the game’s arc. First you pick your objectives, then you try to fulfil them.

This would already be enough to make Faraway a solid, functional card game. One that, much like Fantastic Realms or Forest Shuffle, appeals to the optimizing quirk of great many gamers. But Faraway is, as mentioned above, a good game. The reason why it manages to create good word-of-mouth and even hype is found elsewhere. It’s not the square playing cards. It’s also not the colourful illustrations that are vaguely reminiscent of hiking through unexplored regions in South America. The game is thematically framed as being a trip through the mysterious continent of Alula. A detail that is of great help when explaining the game to people. But during play, it at most serves as a prompt when you play a card. Assuming that you’re the type of player who likes to narrate their turn.

Faraway’s actually clever bit is hidden in the seemingly unremarkable constraints we’re faced with. Over eight rounds we pick a card from no more than three on our hand. This adds weight to every decision we make. Each card we play is either a new commitment we enter, or the attempt to honour an earlier one. Even though our decision space is narrowly drawn, our choices feel impactful. Faraway lets you plot the course. It’s just that following that course might come with some unexpected detours. The cards we play determine turn order, which decides who gets first pick when refilling our hand from the cards on display. And if that display continuously refuses to offer the kind of cards you were banking on, you might find yourself quoting Homer Simpson at the gaming table. Or you might triumphantly lean back, as the display turns one of your impossible seeming card conditions into a resounding success.

Out of this tension between hoping for the luck of the draw and the confidence we play our cards with, Faraway allows for great moments of drama. And because those moments are so enjoyable, you want to tell others about them. This may sound like simple hype, but it’s also the logical consequence of good game design without any obvious design flubs.