A Familiar Find is an adorable trick-taking card game from the folks at Darrington Press staring critters familiar to Critical Role fans (aka Critters). In the game, you’ll be playing one of a number of familiar familiars like Trinket the Bear, Mister the Monkey, Nugget the Blink Dog, C.L.A.P.P. the Octopus, or Evinrude the Magpie as they attempt to gather magical ingredients for a powerful spell.
The basics of the game are fairly simple: you’ll scavenge from a pile of cards that include face-up and face-down cards. If any of the cards you collect are Magic Spells, you’ll resolve those effects immediately.
Then you’ll see if you’ve won or lost. You can win if you have three Astral Essence cards in your hand, or you’ve collected a complete set of Ingredients cards (what constitutes a “full set” depends on how many players are playing).
If you have three Abyss Essence cards, you lose.
Assuming you neither won nor lost, you must now play three cards from your hand into the various piles on the table, two face-up and one face-down. In three or four player games there will be piles that you can and cannot put cards into or take cards from (unless your particular familiar has a special ability that lets you, or you pull a spell card that makes you). Once you’ve resolved all your spell cards and played your three cards, you then draw cards (if necessary) to fill your hand back up to four.
The key to victory is to gather up the cards you need to complete your sets while laying traps for the other players in the cards you play. One fun wrinkle involves running out of cards from the draw pile; if the draw pile ever runs out of cards, the game ends, and the winner is the player with the most Essence cards in hand, whether those are Astral or Abyssal. As the game draws closer to that potential ending, do you gamble on holding Abyssal Essence cards, knowing it can cost you the game if you draw too many? Or do you hold them to ensure victory if the draw pile empties?
There are two additional wrinkles to the game. First, each familiar has special powers. Evinrude the Magpie, for instance, allows you to draw extra cards from the draw pile if you pick up an Ingredient card you have none of yet in your collection. Trinket the Bear allows you collect any one card from any pile if you acquire a third card of a single Ingredient type into your hand. Nugget the Blink Dog allows you to draw a face-up card from any pile if your Scavenge two or more spell cards from a single pile.
The other wrinkle are Location cards. You play a Location card on the top of any and all piles that everyone can draw from. These affect what happens when you play cards on them. For instance, if you play your first card face-up on the Raven’s Crest pile and it was an Essence card, you may play both of your remaining cards face-down. If you play all three of your cards at The Candles, you may place a fourth card face-down on any other pile, even ones you normally wouldn’t be able to play into. The game includes 10 different Familiars and 13 different Location cards, allowing for all sorts of variations to the way the game is played.
A Familiar Find can entertain between two and four players and games generally run less than 45 minutes, meaning you can easily get in two or three games during a single evening or afternoon. The art by John Ramsey and Svetlana Kucheryavenko is adorable and captures the playful (and sometimes macabre) spirit of the familiars from the different Critical Role shows they are from. The game travels well (it’s only cards, no dice to roll off tables or standing pieces that will be knocked over by turbulence) and both fans of clever card games and Critical Role will find a lot to love here. Talk to the familiar folks at your local Dragon’s Lair Comics & Fantasy today about adding A Familiar Find to your game collection.
