Game Preview: If Wishes Were Fishes

By W. Eric Martin
June 11, 2007

Publisher: Rio Grande Games / Abacusspiele
Designer: Peter Sarrett & Michael Adams
Players: 2-5
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 40 minutes
Release Date: June 2007

“If wishes were fishes, I’d cast my net in the sea...”

Believe it or not, that old saying wasn’t the starting point for If Wishes Were Fishes, a game by Peter Sarrett and Michael Adams set to debut in English in June 2007 (and already available in German). “The game began with an idea for a game where you’d draft cards that have two different functions: one if you kept the card and held it for later, and one if you used it immediately,” says Sarrett. “I had that kernel kicking around in my head for a while, and then one day the magic fish fable popped into my head and it fit perfectly, and the game developed around that.”

The magic fish fable, for those who don’t know, is the Brothers Grimm fairy tale ”The Fisherman and His Wife.” The title couple are extremely poor, but one day the fisherman catches a fish that claims to be an echanted prince. The fisherman releases the fish, but the wife shrilly demands that he go back and demand a boon from the fish in exchange for having released it. He does as she asks, which leads only to more wishes and the couple’s eventual comeuppance. This is a fairy tale, after all.

Says Sarrett, “We originally called the game ‘Throw It Back,’ but during playtesting the ‘wishes’ concept was what popped and the rhyme was a natural, so we changed the name to ‘If Wishes Were Fishes.’” Sarrett and Adams created the first prototype in January 2005 and sold it to Jay Tummelson that April. “Initially he expected to print it for November of that year, but you know how things go.”

A player’s choices each turn line up nicely with the fable described above:

• Take a fish card from the ocean and put it in one of your boats,
• Take a fish card from the ocean, use its wish, then release it (on the discard pile), or
• Sell a fish from one of your boats.

Selling a fish nets you at least $2, but you can earn more if buyers await at the market for that type of fish. The buyers come in three sizes, and add $1-3 to the sell price. The fish remains in the market after being sold; when a market reaches its limit—4 fish for the first market, then 5, 6, and finally 7—it closes and additional payments are made to those who sold the most and secondmost fish at this market.

“The marketplace worked completely differently at first,” says Sarrett. “It was a linear track with fixed values, and wishes allowed players to adjust values by moving a fish type up and bumping others down along the track. There wasn’t as much volatility in the market as we wanted: cheap fish tended to stay cheap, and expensive ones expensive. Much of the development went into revising the marketplace into something more fluid.”

Sarrett continues, “Once we had the marketplace working, we tweaked the wishes to fit. There’s a tendency for sellers to bunch together, so we added a wish that pays players to spread them back out, for instance. In testing players tended to hoard worms, so we revised the wish that grants points for worms to mitigate that tendency.” Other wishes grant extra boats and let you sell multiple fish or one kind of fish as if it were another type.

Additional fish sold to a closed market still earn funds, but are dumped on the garbage heap behind the markets. The game ends when the fourth market closes or when ten fish are thrown in the garbage; in the latter situation, the market bonuses turn into penalties for whoever has dumped the most and secondmost.

“The garbage heap was there from the beginning,” says Sarrett. “Once a market for a type of fish closes, we needed a way for all the cards of that type to remain interesting. The garbage heap accomplishes that—but we couldn’t just allow players to keep selling valuable fish and let them rot with no consequences because then the game could stall if players did only that and chose not to close the final market. So the penalty for the garbage heap followed naturally, which creates an extra dimension for the wishes that spoil fish.”

As for how to play, Sarrett says, “With fewer players you have more control, both over what cards you take and which markets score. There’s more strategy in a smaller game, and a larger game is more tactical.” Want to know more about how to play? Download the rules (PDF) and get prepped for its arrival. Hopefully this won’t be a game you want to throw back…

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	The stylin’ cover
	How far will you advance on the road of money?

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