Nine Tails has you raising a fox spirit toward enlightenment.
This involves a surprising number of exhaustion counters.
Help your foxes earn tails through Venturing, Sneaking and Study, dodge your rivals’ Trickery, and be the first to ascend three foxes to enlightenment.
How to play Nine Tails
A quick and concise rules tutorial for Nine Tails.
Nine Tails Game Overview
Quick Rules Summary
Every fox starts with 1 tail and needs 8 more to reach 9 and ascend.
On your turn, you take one of three actions:
Venture, revealing the top 3 cards of the Wilds deck and claiming up to 1 (a Fox card to recruit a new fox, a Study card to give a fox extra trait slots, or a Tail card if a fox can pay its exhaustion cost), with any unclaimed cards spread face up in the Village.
Sneak, taking a single known card from the Village instead.
Rest, clearing all your exhaustion counters and drawing Trickery cards equal to how many unascended foxes you have.
The moment you say “Done,” any other player may try to play a Trickery card; the first to reveal gets to play it.
How do you win?
Ascend three foxes, and you win on the spot.
Main Mechanisms
Resource management in the way you exhaust your traits.
USP
The theme is the USP, it’s not done much.
Theme
Japanese kitsune folklore, forest spirits mentoring fox disciples toward ascension, is a distinct theme for this kind of small card game.
Setup
About as light as it gets. Shuffle three decks, deal a starting fox and 3 Trickery cards to each player, pile up the exhaustion counters, and you’re moving within a couple of minutes.
Components & Artwork
Charming, simple illustrations across the fox, study, tail and trickery cards. Nothing fancy in terms of production, but it suits a small box game and the art does a lot of the theming work on its own.
Ease of Teaching
The three core actions are a one-minute explanation, and paying exhaustion costs for Tail cards is intuitive once you’ve seen it done.
The one thing worth a proper demonstration is the Trickery reveal-and-cancel timing, since that’s the part new players won’t intuit just from reading the card.
Similar Games
Recycle and Game of Trains sit in the same small, quick, interactive card game space.
Nine Tails Review
Positives
It’s cute.
The kitsune theme is a different angle for this kind of game.
The Trickery reveal race keeps it interactive even when you’re not the active player.
It’s also small and quick enough to fit in anywhere a filler is needed.
Negatives
It’s a bit bland.
The real-time bit seems very odd and off-theme.
Summary
A cute, quick, interactive little game that leans entirely on its kitsune theme, but the reveal-race isn’t enough to compete with the best of its genre.
Jesta ThaRogue