Review of The Fae Team, an awesome applaud to an 80’s action adventure!
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The Fae Team is a fun homage to The A Team that everyone can enjoy
The Fae Team is a great fantasy parody of The A Team, but whether you’ve seen the show or not, it works fantastically. It creates a great hook and sets players up for an action-packed adventure full of magical creatures, interesting problems, and even a montage sequence!
It’s rules-lite, so easy to pick up very quickly and understand for any age (you only need to count to 6), with a huge focus on getting into the random fun that comes with playing a tabletop RPG. You have a few things to track on a very clear character sheet, so my kid (4yo) had no problem tracking everything himself, and I had no problem tracking some extra characters to test out the teamwork elements while also being the Story Guide.
This game was fun for both my kid (who doesn’t know The A Team) and me (who grew up watching The A Team with my dad), so The Fae Team is a great game for the whole family to enjoy regardless of if they’re fans of the show or not. It’s just a fun game that lends towards some wacky shenanigans.
The Fae Team is set in a world of fairies and humans
The Fae Team takes place in the world of fairies and the world of humans. You are a group of magical woodland creatures who were wrongfully imprisoned and then broke out! You now help solve big problems that no else can while evading capture!
Your adventures lie within the fae realm and through portals to the mundane human world as you try to solve mysteries, intervene with those darned humans, and… sometimes just plan an awesome party.
There’s a great set of roll tables for the Story Guide to help come up with ideas and player questions to build the world and quickly create a unique and fun adventure setting that still fits the themes of the game each time you play.
Your character in The Fae Team
Character creation in The Fae Team is really easy to set up and then keep track of afterwards. You pick a name and pronouns, type of animal (like a rabbit or a frog), trait (like sneaky or friendly), Fae Gift (like Faerie Wings or plant magic), and a simple item (like string or, as the game suggests, a marker for drawing a mustache on a sleeping human). You then pick your roll number, which we’ll get more into in the mechanics section, and you’re all set!
For each of these, there’s lists, roll tables, and/or examples so you don’t ever get stuck or run out of ideas.
For our game, we happened to roll up some nice alliterated character features and then named our little fox accordingly. My kid’s character was: Foxrick (he/him) the Friendly Fox who can use Fire Magic and carries around a Fork.
After that, your whole group comes up with a motto together, which, for us, we continued with our alliteration theme to make: Fae Fire Friends Forever!
The character sheet is really easy to track during the game too – there’s a summary of everything for your character, a nice sliding scale graphic to show how you roll and what your number is, and a summary of all the rules that the player needs. Everything is on 1 page and easy to parse out mid-game.
Easy game mechanics facilitate fast paced fun in The Fae Team
Rolling for Whiskers and Claws
I mentioned picking a number during character creation; this is your Whiskers and Claws number. You pick a number between 2 and 5 and use this to determine how good your character is at strength/physical type tasks and diplomacy/magic type tasks.
When you need to roll to see if you succeed, you want to get as many dice as possible at or below your number to complete a Whiskers roll and at or above your number for a Claws roll. You earn extra dice rolls from getting help, using your gift, etc and total up how many dice meet the roll criteria to see if you failed or succeeded and if there’s any consequences.
First, the Whiskers vs. Claws rolls are just really cute to start with and tie really well into the character creation and themes of the game. From a mechanics standpoint, they allow for any character to really do any task but with a clear sliding scale for difficulty. There’s collaborative elements with allowing bonus rolls for help, and there’s rewards for strategizing how to use traits and gifts for your character. All of that ends up being intuitively part of the decision process for how to come up with plans and helps players to problem solve together.
In addition, the most complicated math that you’re doing with this mechanics set up is counting to 6 and doing a greater than/less than comparison to your number. For my kid (4yo), this was perfect for getting him to practice some really basic math skills in a fun way and let him manage his rolls and counting without me needing to intervene or help.
Action Montages!!
One of the best parts of The Fae Team was when we got to do a montage sequence! Once per game, players are allowed to treat a roll as a critical success and pull off an epic action montage sequence…. Only if they all recite the team motto and everyone helps in some way.
For our game, my kid had his character, Foxrick, and I also had a couple characters (Mr. B the Badger and Smith the Squirrel) that I was controlling so we could try out the team mechanics. When we got to the montage… it was a lot of fun. We had a fire breathing fox running around as a distraction while our badger friend used size control to get big and bust down a wall and Smith the Squirrel ran around on the walls and ceilings using spider powers to break into a museum to steal back a bunch of fairy gems!! We had to plan things out, we drew out a map, and then everything happened all at once as we pulled off the heist!
The montage mechanic prompted a few things. First off was team problem solving. I let my kid take the reins as the leader of the plan, but, because everyone needed to be included to do a montage, we ended up highlighting everyone, and it helped him see he needed to share the spotlight and work with others (to do even cooler stuff). We walked through the plan and then did it!
The other thing this does is… you’re guaranteed a critical success, so get a satisfying part to the game and everyone gets to feel like a hero. Everyone was involved in that sequence, so no players get left behind, and they all have this epic story to tell and remember!
What did my kid think about The Fae Team?
I asked my kid (4yo) what he thought about The Fae Team, and he said, “Foxrick can breathe fire! I love him!” and “That was really fun! I want to play again, but next time I think we should rescue a fairy dinosaur, but it needs to be a plant eater.”
So, my kid had a lot of fun with his character and really wants to play this again with some of his own ideas (and is making up lots more stories about our fox, badger, and squirrel team).
I also noticed that, as he played, he really got the team aspects with this one. It may be a function of us playing more team building games and working on this too, but, either way, this got him to practice sharing the spotlight more and more. He was asking questions, asking for help, and offering help on rolls quite a bit, and I was very proud to see him having fun with it. Asking for and giving help was done with a smile and excitement instead of with frustration about not being able to do it on his own. I think The Fae Team did help with that because the characters and abilities are just fun and kind of bombastic, and it facilitates doing some really cool combo moves that you really can’t do on your own. It’s a pretty foundational part of the mechanics, and he seemed to both understand and enjoy it.
Overall thoughts on The Fae Team
I had a lot of fun with this game, and so did my kid. As I covered above, my kid enjoyed the game, the story, and the system and is eager to play The Fae Team again. For me, it was fun to remember some of The A Team shenanigans from watching the show growing up, and seeing my kid enjoy that style of game hit me in the feels a bit. I made way too many references that he didn’t get, but we all still laughed, and it was a good time.
The mechanics are great – they’re easy, they facilitate teamwork, and they help everyone feel like an amazing hero. Characters are awesome with lots of flair while still being easy to track. There’s help for getting ideas for both the players and the Story Guide. I highly recommend trying it out, and also… Fae Fire Friends Forever!
Find a copy of The Fae Team
The Fae Team can be found here on itchio!
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Thank you so much for trying out my game! It’s awesome to hear stories about it being played. 🙂
For sure! And thank you for making an awesome tabletop RPG that I was able to play with my kid! We had a lot of fun with it!