Fantasy Realms vs Faraway: Which Should You Buy?

Fantasy Realms is about as simple as a card game gets. You hold seven cards, and on your turn you draw one and discard one into a shared face-up pool. That's the entire rulebook. The game lives in the cards themselves, where each one belongs to a fantasy suit (Army, Flood, Wizard, that sort of thing) and carries a base value plus a tangle of bonuses and penalties that fire off what else you're holding. The joy is watching a sad starting hand slowly get wired into something that scores absurdly high. And that face-up discard pool adds a lovely little wince, because the card you toss might be exactly what your neighbor was praying for.

Faraway asks more of you, and in a sneakier way. You build a row of eight cards from left to right over the game, then score them in reverse, last card first, where a card only counts the icons already revealed to its right. So the order you play in and the order you score in are fighting each other the whole time. Low numbers early get you better picks, high numbers get you the payoff, and every card does double duty as both resource and points, so every single pick is a real squeeze. Where Fantasy Realms hands you the fun immediately, Faraway makes you earn it by thinking backwards.

This is the biggest practical gap between them. Fantasy Realms is easy to teach and hard to master, and your table will be having fun within the first few draws. The one wrinkle is scoring. Adding up all those bonuses and penalties by hand is fiddly and slow enough that the free scoring app feels mandatory, so just download it before game night and you're golden.

Faraway carries an honest warning label instead. The first game will not click, full stop, and some groups need two or three plays before it does. Brains trained on years of forward-scoring card games tend to turn to mush when the scoring runs in reverse, and one planning slip can leave a key Wonder face-down and worthless. That's not a flaw so much as the price of admission for something genuinely original. If your group gives new games a fair second chance, it's worth it. If they judge everything on play one, Fantasy Realms is the safer teach.

Both games have real staying power, but for different reasons. Fantasy Realms is a near-perfect filler, the kind of game players wear their copies out on. Fifty-three cards that all feel distinct and thematic mean the combo puzzle stays fresh, and the 15-20 minute runtime makes it a perfect opener or closer at any count from 2 to 6. The honest catch is card luck. A cold run of draws can leave you limping to the finish while everyone else combos off, and there's not much you can do about it that night except shuffle up again.

Faraway's replay hook is that it keeps rewarding you as your brain adjusts. The reverse scoring is genuinely fresh, not a gimmick bolted onto a familiar engine, and the second and third plays are better than the first. It has its own luck problem, though. If the draft pool won't feed your plan, you can do everything right and still come up short. And know what you're getting socially. Interaction in Faraway is nearly nonexistent beyond elbowing over Sanctuary cards, while Fantasy Realms at least gives you that shared discard pool tension. Neither is the game for a table that wants to mess with each other. The theme is paper-thin in Faraway too, so come for the puzzle, not a story.