First Impression: Fagin’s Gang

By W. Eric Martin
March 31, 2007

Publisher: Ludorum Games
Designer: Dean Conrad
Players: 2-6
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 60-150 minutes
Rules Languages: English

Game Played: Final Version
Number of Plays: Once with 3 players, and once with 4

Fagin’s Gang seems like a prototypical Eurogame. When you open the box, you’re greeted with two big bags of wooden bits—180 cubes in six colors, and 30 player pawns in six other colors—a brightly colored gameboard, and a theme that washes away once you start playing.

The setting, for those who aren’t up on their Dickens, is that you belong to a gang of thieving street urchins straight from the pages of Oliver Twist. Fagin leads the gang, but he’s taken ill, so you and the other players must take charge of five urchins each, then steal and fence enough goods that you can return to Fagin safely. (Apparently he beats you unless you hand over the proper amount of shillings upon returning to the gang’s lair.)

The board is divided into six locations, along with a central market. On a player’s turn, that player takes one of four possible actions:

• Move urchins in up to three locations,
• Steal shillings in up to three locations,
• Steal goods in up to three locations, or
• Go to market.

Entering into and moving around a location requires you to spend a particular type of good. You enter a location in the middle of the block, and to enter or move up or down one level, you must pay the proper amount of goods. Moving in St. Paul’s Cathedral costs four pieces of jewelry, for example, while moving along the River Thames costs only one book. You can move as many spaces as you can pay for, although you can move at most three urchins on a turn, and no player may have more than one urchin in a location. Only one urchin can occupy a level, so if you land on a pawn, you get to bump it one level up or down.

What you can do in these locations is either steal shillings by pickpocketing passers-by or steal goods. At one end of the location, you can steal lots of shillings and few goods, while at the other end, you can steal lots of goods and few shillings. The goods that you steal in one location never match the color of goods needed to move in that location (except for the “wild goods” space at the top of each location), so you need to plan thefts in one place in order to fuel the move of an urchin somewhere else.

Shillings are used to buy goods at market, which starts the game filled with two to five pieces of each good. Prices for goods vary from 2 to 12 shillings, and each player starts with 20 shillings. When a player chooses to go to market, everyone gets a chance to buy and sell goods. The active player can buy two goods or sell two goods, then in counter-clockwise order, each other player can buy or sell one good. Market actions continue around the table until all players have withdrawn from the market. Goods sold are placed on an empty market stall, so if the stalls for a good are full, you can’t sell. Likewise, if the stalls are empty, you can’t purchase a good—unless someone else sells one first.

After each player has taken one action, you move the constable in each occupied location. The constables are placed in a random location at the start of the game, then move 1-6 spaces each turn as determined by a die roll. If a constable lands on an urchin, it bumps the urchin one level in the direction of its movement. If an urchin is on the top or bottom level—where the payout for goods or shillings is best—it can be bumped off the location and back into a player’s reserve.

Next, players discard cubes of their choice, if necessary, in order to have no more than 15. You then roll the die to determine how many spaces to rotate the market indicator; the prices on the indicator go from 2-12 in increments of two in counter-clockwise order. Finally, the round’s start player passes the turn marker clockwise, and the next round begins.

Your goal is to return three urchins to Fagin, and you do this by moving an urchin off the top level of a location and paying 15 shillings, the cost for room and board at Fagin’s place. Once you move an urchin off a location, it’s off-limits to you for the rest of the game. The game ends as soon as a player returns his or her third urchin.

Despite the designer’s efforts to inject theme, Fagin’s Gang comes across as the epitome of cube management. Players never talk about stealing fruit, silverware, and silk handkerchiefs; instead they talk about green, black and red cubes. You’re not moving an urchin through Bow Street to lift a wallet; you’re moving a pawn on a rectangular grid in order to lie adjacent to a high number.

I often strip theme from the games I play because I’m more interested in a game’s mechanisms and how to solve the puzzle they present, but with Fagin’s Gang I actually wanted more theme and story. This feeling might result from the bare bones nature of the gameboard and your possible actions. Why does an urchin have to give up pocket watches to move up and down Chertsey? Why would anyone have to pay anything to move up and down Chertsey? After all, I don’t think London had toll walkways back in Dickens’ time.

(As an aside, I wondered why urchins couldn’t steal from one another or make forced trades when they bump another urchin on the street. This seemed like a misssed opportunity for carrying the theme into the game play.

The arbitrary nature of the market is an interesting game mechanism. Throughout the game, the goods for sale ebb and flow as the prices fluctuate. Whatever good carries a price of 12 is sold until the market fills, while the cheap goods are plundered. A turn later—or two or three or five or never, depending on the capricious roll of the die—the cheap and expensive are reversed, and the goods flow the opposite way. In practice, though, the market’s unpredictability is a drawback because you can’t effectively plan for the market on any future turn. If the die used to adjust the market went from 1-2 or 1-3 instead of 1-6, the market would have a definite, if still hiccupy, rhythm that you could try to work, looking ahead to see what’s going to rise and fall in the immediate future.

Being able to perform only one action each turn is sensible as it presents players with the standard “I want to do more things than possible” dilemma, but with the market flicking around like a cat’s tail, one action doesn’t seem like enough. You can swipe lots of shillings, but you can’t use them until next turn, by which time the goods you need might rocket up due to inflation—thereby forcing you to do something else which may or may not advance your cause.

In the end, while the resource management fan in me liked the ideas behind Fagin’s Gang, the game itself felt somewhat dull. I wanted more control over the market and more pizazz in the turn-by-turn play.

Strangely, both games were won by the player who ran two urchins to safety quickly, then hogged a space in the purple location that gave three red cubes a turn; after enough turns, the player jetted the urchin in the red location safely into Fagin’s arms for the win. Moving on the purple location costs four cubes, so even when the player’s plans became apparent to everyone three turns before a victory was possible, no one could manuever urchins into positions that would earn enough purple cubes to bump out the other player. The winner was clear several turns in advance, which was something of a letdown. I assume further experience would enable you to prevent someone from creating that engine, but I don’t know whether I’ll ever play the game enough to gain that experience.

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Comments:

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Great review! I’ve had this game on the radar for awhile and I’ve even read the rules, but it gave me a bit too much of an abstract feeling, which you also stressed. I realise that this is a “test before buy” game and as it probably won’t be general available in Sweden, I will never have a chance to test it, as I’m among those here who buys a lot of games before testing. So it’s a “catch 22”. Posted by Carl Samuelsson on Mar 31, 2007 at 10:11 AM | #

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