Game Review: What The Fog?!, or I Feel Stormy Weather Moving In

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At SPIEL Essen 24, I met with Bert Calis from <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/267/999-games“>999 games for an overview of current and future releases. This Dutch publisher lacks a booth at that convention, but Calis is there to make deals with publishers, so I took advantage of his time, something I do with other publishers in the same situation.

(Note to publishers: Feel free to reach out to me in advance for such meetings. I can’t guarantee a meeting, but if I don’t know you’re on site, then we definitely can’t meet!)

After showing me Reiner Knizia‘s Pick a Pen: Hackers (which AMIGO has picked up for Germany), revealing a U.S. licensing deal for Peter Jürgensen‘s The Brain (still to be announced), and flashing new Dutch editions of Stefan Dorra‘s Turn the Tide and Günter Burkhardt‘s Ziegen Kriegen, Calis brought out Leo Colovini‘s What The Fog?!, the title of which is surely meant to be shouted in astonishment whenever possible.

I’m a huge Colovini connoisseur, so I appreciated the game overview — then Calis offered the copy on hand, and I was happy to help him regain luggage space in exchange for a chance to play this design.

What The Fog?! is a 2-5 player game in which players take turns placing weather tiles on quadrants of a day, after which they compare their strength on the various days. Weather comes in six types, and each player has a hand of weather cards; to determine your strength in a day, multiply each tile on a day by the number of cards of that type in your hand, then sum those values.

This might sound complicated, but is easy in practice. An example:

The player on the left scores 4 points (2 for sun, 2 for water) whereas the player on the right scores 5 points (2 each for clouds and water, 1 for sun), so in a two-player game, the player on the right wins the day. (Ties are possible.)

But…

The game doesn’t challenge you to win more days than other players; instead it challenges you to predict how many days you will win. If you win the number that you predict, then you score points equal to your prediction, plus the number of the round being played. (The game lasts four rounds.) If you win more or fewer days than you predicted, you lose points equal to the difference between the two.

Thus, it’s more important to nail your prediction than it is to win more days. To help you do this, the game gives you bits of control:

• You place one of three weather tiles on display on the leftmost open space of the day of your choice.
• You each reveal 2-4 cards at various points during a round.
• You might get to discard a card, then draw a new one…but at most three such actions take place in a round.
• Before the final strength tallying, you each discard a card.

Playing at BGG.CON 2024

I’ve now played What The Fog?! four times with 3-5 players, and it’s an archetypal Colovini design — think Clans and Familienbande, KuZOOka and Castello Methoni — in that players have both public and private information and must navigate a shared space that they create one turn at a time.

If I place snow next to fog, I must have both of those cards in hand, right? Maybe even multiple copies?

Or do I? Again, I don’t have to win days to score — only predict how many days I will win. I mean, yes, if I have a choice, I want to predict a higher number when being right since I’ll score more points, but more than anything else, I want to be right…so I might want to set up days that I won’t win.

What’s more, maybe after seeing multiple opponents reveal snow and fog, I want to partner snow and fog on certain days to make it more challenging for them to assess whether they’ll end up on top. In one game, a player bid zero in the third round but engineered days that led to three of us missing our predictions, so they scored 3 points and we each lost at least 1 point. Making others lose is how you can win.

Not the most photogenic game on the market…

As the game progresses, you have more days in a round — going from four to seven — and more cards in hand — from five to eight — which boosts the challenge since you now have a wider range of possible strengths for a day, as well as more chances to make mistakes.

Having more players in a game gives you less control since the number of tiles being placed in a round doesn’t change and you have more competitors, but I love the tug-of-war feel of trying to land in just the right spot with my prediction.

How this works is that when the final quadrant of a day is filled, you get to raise your prediction by 1 or stay where you are. In the first round, for example, your prediction can be 0-4, but after one day is filled, you’ll be locked into a prediction of either 1-4 (if you raise your prediction) or 0-3 (if you don’t). Then you’ll be locked in to 2-4, 1-3, or 0-2. The walls close in, but you decide where they stop.