Review: House of Fado

Introducción

Welcome to House of Fado, a Portuguese restaurant that serves typical food and wine from Portugal and offers performances of fado, a traditional music genre that is iconic and globally recognized. Fado is a musical genre whose origins in Lisbon, Portugal, date back to the 1820s, although they are probably much older. Although its roots are difficult to trace, today fado is popularly regarded as a form of singing that can be about any subject, but must follow a certain traditional structure. In popular belief, fado is a form of music characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea or the life of the poor, and infused with a sentiment of resignation, fate, and melancholy. This is loosely defined by the Portuguese word saudade (longing), which symbolizes a feeling of loss.

This is how Casa de Fado is presented to us, a design by João Quintela Martins (Bot Factory, Lusitania) and Vital Lacerda (Lisboa, Vinhos). First published in 2025 by Eagle-Gryphon Games in an English version following a successful crowdfunding campaign. The illustrations are handled by Marina Costa (Café, Oliva, Lata).

It is published in Spain by Maldito Games (the game is completely language-independent except for the rulebook). It allows for games of 1 to 4 players, with a suggested minimum age of 14 and an approximate duration of 30 to 60 minutes. The MSRP is €60. For this review, a copy of the Spanish version by Maldito Games was used, which the publisher itself kindly provided to us.

Importante: si ya conoces el juego y/o sólo te interesa mi opinión sobre el mismo, puedes pasar directamente al apartado de Opinión. Los apartados Contenido y Mecánica están destinados especialmente a aquellos que no conocen el juego y prefieren hacerse una idea general de cómo funciona.

Ir a la Opinión Personal

Contenido

Inside a two-piece cardboard box (lid and bottom), measuring 31.5×22.7×5 cm. (a rectangular box similar to Railway Boom), we find the following elements:

• Main Board (cardboard)
• 4 Restaurant Boards (cardboard)
• 18 Musician Tiles (cardboard):
  • 6 Portuguese Guitar
  • 6 Singers
  • 6 Classical Guitar
• 18 Fado Tiles (cardboard)
• 33 Musical Notation Tokens (cardboard)
• 36 Customers (wooden):
  • 8 Grey
  • 12 Black
  • 16 Brown
• 3 Critics (wooden)
• Customer Bag (cloth)
• 18 Dice (plastic)
• 5 Stars (wooden)
• First Player Marker (cardboard)
• 3 Billboard Scoring Tiles (cardboard)
• 12 Workers (3 of each color) (wooden)
• 32 Prestige Cubes (8 of each color) (wooden)
• 4 Scoring Discs (1 of each color) (wooden)
• 4 Decoration Tiles (cardboard)
• Coins (values of 1, 5, and 10) (cardboard)
• Rulebook

Mecánica

House of Fado is a management game set in traditional Portuguese fado houses, where each player competes to achieve the highest reputation by hiring musicians, attracting customers, and composing songs. Throughout the game, players alternate turns placing their workers in the different locations on the board to hire or promote artists, seat customers and critics at their tables, or get the musical notation needed to write fados. It features a twist: if a space is occupied, the rival worker can be bumped to a displacement space (earning that player a benefit). As an alternative, each player has an exclusive action on their personal board to close the restaurant for the day—a phase in which customers pay for their meals, applaud the musicians according to their color to increase their fame, and finally, leave the premises. These actions allow players to free up prestige cubes to expand table capacity, boost earnings, and reduce the cost of demanding critics. The game ends at the conclusion of the round in which the third star is claimed from the central pool, at which point the final scoring takes place, adding up the fame of the current band, accumulated stars, performance on the billboard charts, composed songs, and remaining money. The player with the highest score will be declared the winner.

Conceptos Básicos

Let’s start with the Main Board. This element is deployed in the middle of the table and functions as the map of locations where players will place their workers to perform the various available actions. The board organizes the musician market divided by their instrument at the top, the piles of musical notation tokens at the bottom left, the space for fado tiles (above the musical notation tokens), and the street zones where customers and critics gather before being drawn to the venues (in the center area). It also includes spaces for the billboard scoring tiles (below the customers). On the right, there is space to place the artists who reached stardom, and, on the top and bottom borders, the classic scoring track.

Let’s move on to the Restaurant Boards. This component represents a fado venue and features three main spaces in its top-central area to place musicians according to their specialty: Portuguese guitar on the left, singer in the center, and classical guitar on the right. In the lower part, it has a track to organize musical notation tokens and a prestige track initially covered by cubes that the player must gradually free up. In addition, it shows a dining area with tables to seat customers and critics who enter the restaurant, a space to hang the frames of the composed fados, and a bar area to keep customers waiting, as well as an exclusive action space that allows closing the business to trigger the production and maintenance phase. The top-left corner shows the hiring cost and the customers required to level up a musician.

The ones responsible for executing movements across the locations are the Workers. Each player has a set of three wooden pawns of their color. At the beginning of the game, these workers are gradually introduced into the action spaces of the main board or the restaurant during the first few turns; starting from the fourth round, players are forced to move the pawns they already have deployed on the board. A player can place a worker in an action space where they do not already have a worker. If it is occupied by another player’s worker, that worker will be displaced to one of the bumping spaces, granting immediate benefits to its owner.

To bring the musical performances to life, we have the Musician Tiles. These tiles represent the professional artists that can be hired from the market or promoted on the billboard, divided into three traditional disciplines (Portuguese guitar, singer, and traditional guitar). Each tile shows a space in its top-right corner to place a die, and a specific musical notation in its bottom-left corner which is obtained upon hiring them. When a musician leaves a player’s board for any reason, they will provide as many victory points as their current level.

To track the level of each musician, Level Dice are used. Each musician tile is accompanied by a die placed on top to numerically indicate their current fame level, which ranges from 1 to 6. Each face shows an arrow pointing toward the direction the die must be flipped to reach the next value.

The Musical Notation Tokens show different symbols and musical notes. Players obtain them mainly when hiring new musicians from the supply or when activating certain displacement benefits. Their purpose in the game is to serve as the necessary resource to write music.

The Fado Tiles represent the traditional songs that restaurants can compose and premiere at their venues. Each tile shows a specific combination of musical notation symbols that must be returned to the general supply to acquire it (by executing the corresponding action), as well as a direct amount of printed victory points.

The drivers of the venues’ economy are the Customers. Represented by wooden meeples randomly drawn from a cloth bag, they are divided into three specific colors: grey, black, and brown. They are placed in street groups, from where players can acquire them with a specific action to deploy them at their restaurant tables. Their role is twofold: on one hand, they pay for food, generating direct income based on the level of the restaurant’s prestige track, and on the other hand, their color determines which type of musician they can help level up through their applause when closing the venue.

There is a fourth meeple color: the Critics. These are initially placed on the street next to the customer groups and can be attracted to the restaurant by paying a cost that decreases as the player progresses along their prestige track. A critic occupies a full table individually, does not generate income for food, and does not applaud musicians; however, when closing the restaurant, their presence allows the permanent removal of the two leftmost prestige cubes from the player’s board, accelerating restaurant progression and upgrades before returning to the street.

To measure game milestones, Stars are used. The game includes a total of five star tokens placed in specific spaces on the main board during setup, linked to achievements such as being the first to write three fados, being the first to bring a musician to the peak of their career (fame 6) in each specialty, or being the first to unlock the four-customer table. At the end of the game, victory points are awarded based on the number of stars a player has accumulated, while also acting as the endgame trigger as soon as the third one is removed from the main board.

The external exposure of the artists is managed through the Billboard Scoring Tiles. These pieces are randomly placed in the three spaces of the billboard location on the main board, showing a number of scoring rows adapted to the player count of the game. Players will place their prestige cubes when promoting their musicians in those spaces and, at the end of the game, points will be awarded based on the relative ranking among players according to the number of cubes placed in the billboard space.

The main resource of the game is Money, represented by coins with values of 1, 5, and 10. Players need it to cover the hiring costs of musicians in the market, pay critic fees, settle the cost of training artists in rehearsals, or hire renowned figures from the billboard. Money is primarily collected during the restaurant closing phase, where each customer seated at the tables pays a fixed amount determined by the development of the player’s prestige track.

For progress management, Prestige Cubes are used. Each player begins the game with a set of eight cubes of their color, placed covering the prestige track bonuses on their individual board. These cubes function as a development limiter; when promoting musicians or receiving reviews from critics, cubes are moved from the personal board to the billboard or eliminated, which progressively unlocks benefits such as reduced critic costs, increased income per customer, or opening up the third dining table by removing the initial Decoration Tile.

Lastly, the players’ goal is to accumulate as many victory points as possible. This amount is recorded on the scoring track using Scoring Discs.

That is enough to get us started.

Preparación de la Partida

1. Place the game board in the center of the table.
2. Determine the number of musician tiles to use based on the player count, returning those marked with a ‘4’ to the box for 3-player games, or ‘3+’ and ‘4’ for 2-player games. With the remaining tiles, create the musician market by placing them face up in their corresponding spaces according to their specialty.
3. Sort the musical notation tokens into four piles according to the symbol they show and place them face up in their spaces on the board.
4. Select the Fado tiles corresponding to the number of players, using only those with a ‘2’ on their back for 2-player games. Shuffle the remaining tiles face down to form the Fado deck to the left of the board, reveal the top 4 in their spaces, and flip the top tile of the deck face up.
5. Introduce a number of customers of different colors into the cloth bag based on the player count, at a rate of 2 grey, 3 black, and 4 brown for each player. In 2 or 3-player games, excess customers are returned to the box.
6. Form three groups of customers on the board by drawing 4 random customers from the bag for each group.
7. Place the critics in their spaces on the board next to the customer groups according to the player count: 3 critics (one per group) for 4 players; 2 critics (in the outer groups) for 3 players; or 1 critic (in the central group) for 2 players. Excess critics are returned to the box.
8. Place the 5 stars in their indicated positions on the board.
9. Shuffle the billboard scoring tiles and place one in each of the 3 spaces on the board, showing the 3-score side for 3 or 4 players, or the 2-score side for 2 players.
10. Set the dice and coins aside to form the general supply.
11. Each player chooses a color and receives:
    • 1 Restaurant Board (placed in their play area).
    • 3 Workers (left next to their board).
    • 8 Prestige Cubes (placed in the spaces of the lower track on their personal board).
    • 1 Scoring Disc (placed on the starting space of the scoring track).
    • 1 Decoration Tile (covering the 4-customer table).
12. Each player receives 5 coins and one treble clef musical notation token from the supply, placing it in the corresponding space at the bottom of their board.
13. Choose the starting player randomly.

We are ready to begin!

Desarrollo de la Partida

A game of House of Fado takes place over an indefinite number of rounds. In each round, starting with the first player and continuing clockwise, each player takes a turn.

On their turn, the active player must activate an action space (in the first 3 turns, this will be done by placing a worker from their personal supply, but from the fourth turn onward, they must move a previously placed pawn). A worker can only be placed in a space where the player does not already have a worker (whether in the main space or a displacement space). If a player bumps a rival pawn, the rival player must choose which displacement space to place their bumped pawn in, gaining the corresponding reward. A player cannot place a worker in an action space if they have just removed it from that same action space or its three associated Displacement spaces on that turn.

After this, the turn passes to the next player.

The main actions available on the central board and the personal board are:

• Musician Market. Allows hiring new talent for the restaurant. The player can hire up to 1 musician from the group to the left and up to 1 musician from the group to the right of the action space. If the chosen musician does not have a die on top, a die with a value of 1 (initial Fame) is placed immediately. The hiring cost is calculated by adding up the value of the musician’s current Fame, determined by their die and the cost table (1/2/3/4/5 fame costs 1/3/6/10/15 coins). The hired musician is placed in their corresponding space on the restaurant board (Portuguese Guitar on the left, Singer in the center, or Classical Guitar on the right). Having more than one musician of the same specialty is not allowed. When hiring the musician, the player takes a musical notation tile from the central board that matches the musical note in the bottom-left corner of the musician tile and places it on their personal board.
• The Street. Allows attracting customers or reputation to the business. The player must choose one of the following two options:
  • Attract Customers: The player chooses a single group of customers (the one to the left or the right of the action space) and takes up to 4 customers from it to seat them together at a single empty table in their restaurant. Splitting customers from the same action across multiple tables is not allowed. The maximum number of customers admitted depends on the table’s capacity (2 at the first table, 3 at the second, and 4 at the third table if unlocked; the bar spaces are reserved for displacement bonuses). If at the end of the turn there are 0 or 1 customers left in any street group, that group is replenished by drawing customers from the bag until there are 4 again.
  • Attract a Critic: The player pays the corresponding money cost based on the current state of their Prestige track (3/2/1/0 coins depending on the cubes removed) and takes a critic located in the customer groups adjacent to the action. The critic sits at an empty table in the restaurant. Having more than one critic simultaneously is not allowed. The critic occupies a full table.
• Rehearsal Room. Allows composing songs and making musical progress. The player must choose one of the following two options:
  • Score a Fado Tile: The player selects an available Fado tile on the central board and returns notation tokens from their personal board to the general supply that exactly match the musical symbols required on the Fado tile. After paying the notation cost, the Fado tile is placed in the restaurant’s display and the player records the corresponding Prestige points on the scoring track. The claimed tile is immediately replenished with the top visible tile from the Fado deck. The first player to get 3 Fado tiles takes the Star from this location.
  • Obtain a Notation Tile: The player takes a notation tile directly from the main board and adds it to the bottom area of their restaurant board.
• Billboard. Allows promoting current staff musicians or hiring renowned artists. The player must choose one of the following two options:
  • Promote a Musician: The player moves a musician from their restaurant (who has a minimum Fame value of 2) to the corresponding space for their specialty on the Billboard. The action space on the left only allows promoting Portuguese Guitar players or Singers, while the one on the right allows promoting Singers or Classical Guitar players. If the space already contains a musician, the new one must have a higher Fame level; the displaced musician returns to the market with their die intact. Upon promoting, the player removes the leftmost Prestige cube from their personal track, places it next to the musician on the Billboard, and scores as many Prestige points as the value on the musician’s die.
  • Hire a Renowned Musician: The player takes a musician tile directly from the Billboard area by paying their cost by Fame (indicated on the personal board). Specialty restrictions per action space (left or right) apply in the same way as in promotion. The musician joins the player’s restaurant, and the player receives their corresponding Notation tile from the main board.
• Close the Restaurant. Allows evaluating the day and activating business maintenance. The player must execute the following 5 steps in order:
  1. Customers Pay: The player receives money for each customer seated at the tables of their restaurant based on the current value of their Prestige track (1 coin if they have removed 2 or fewer cubes; 2 coins if they have removed between 3 and 6 cubes; 3 coins if they have removed 7 or more cubes). Customers at the bar and critics do not pay.
  2. Customers Applaud: Ensuring that all customers start lying down, the player can stand up customers at the tables or the bar to increase the Fame of their musicians according to the applause requirements table. Guitar players (Portuguese or classical) only accept applause from grey or brown customers. Singers only accept applause from grey or black customers. Each stood-up customer contributes their applause to a single musician to increase a single Fame level. Critics do not applaud.
     • The Peak of the Career: If a musician reaches Fame 6, they reach the top. If they are the first in their specialty in the entire game to achieve this, they are moved to the Star Musician space on the central board, granting their owner a Star and 6 Prestige points. If they are not the first, the player decides whether to keep them in their restaurant or retire them from the game, scoring 6 Prestige points.
  3. Maintain/Fire Musicians: The player decides for each musician whether to keep them on staff or fire them. If they fire them, they return the tile to the market keeping their die value and score as many Prestige points as their current Fame value. Additionally, if there is a Critic in the restaurant, their review is resolved: the 2 leftmost Prestige cubes are removed from the personal track, and the critic returns to the street.
  4. Customers Leave the Venue: All customers in the restaurant are discarded and sent to the general discard pile.
  5. Unlocking the Prestige Track: By removing Prestige cubes due to promotions or critic reviews, permanent upgrades are activated. Removing the 2nd, 4th, and 6th cube reduces the cost of hiring critics. Removing the 3rd and 7th cube increases the money paid by customers. Removing the 5th cube removes the Decoration tile, permanently unlocking the third dining table with a capacity for 4 customers. The first player to completely empty their Prestige track obtains the Star from the main board.

Fin de la Partida

The final round is triggered when the third star is removed from the board. Once completed, players proceed with the final scoring, where each player scores:

• Victory points equal to the Fame indicated on the die of each of their Musician tiles.
• Victory points determined by the total number of accumulated Star tiles (10/15/21/28 points for 1/2/3/4 stars).
• Victory points awarded by the billboard scoring tile for the player who possesses the most Prestige cubes in each specialty, and for the second (or third, depending on player count) with the most cubes. In case of a tie, the points of the tied positions are added up and divided among the involved players (rounding down).
• Victory points based on the total number of Fado tiles scored during the game (3/6/10/15 points for having composed 1/2/3/4 fados).
• 1 Victory point for every 5 coins the player possesses.

The player with the most victory points will be the winner. In case of a tie, the following tiebreakers are used:

1. The tied player with the most Stars.
2. The player who has scored the most Fado tiles.
3. Whoever has the most remaining money.

If a tie still persists, the players share the victory.

Variantes

Solo Mode. The player faces an automaton called Alfama, who does not use money or receive benefits from displacement spaces. During their turn, the player performs a normal action in the usual way; immediately after, Alfama’s worker closest in a clockwise direction automatically moves to the next free space to execute their own action. Alfama’s behavior in each location is predetermined: they hire or promote musicians of higher fame, attract customers following a color priority order to fill their tables from left to right, or compose the top Fado from the deck if they have enough tokens. When closing the restaurant, Alfama earns direct points per customer instead of money, increases the fame of all their musicians based on the number of occupied tables, and discards the guests. The game ends after the third star is removed from the board, and the player must beat the automaton’s final score to win.

Opinión Personal

We have been going through a few years now in which the board game world seems to have entered a bit of a valley regarding ideas when it comes to publishing new games. The fact that the hobby has expanded so much brings along a search for greater profitability by publishers, which leads them to be conservative when proposing titles.

You know how it goes, if it works, don’t fix it. For this reason, the number of editions and reimplementations has skyrocketed. As soon as a game works reasonably well, the corresponding publisher doesn’t take long to try to turn it into a franchise, either through expansions (which is nothing new) or by publishing spin-off products (two-player games, dice games, card games, etc.). The latter isn’t exactly new either, but the feeling is that it has become far too widespread.

The downside? Well, in a very high percentage of cases, neither do expansions substantially improve the game (often even condemning it by surrounding it with so much material that it feels like a chore to bring to the table), nor do alternative versions offer a better gaming experience—with honorable exceptions such as Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game (here is its tocho-review) or Splendor Duel (here is its tocho-review).

Within this line of spin-off products, Eagle-Gryphon Games began exploring a new line of medium-to-light weight games based on the great designs of Vital Lacerda. The first was Mercado de Lisboa (here is its tocho-review), which took one of the concepts from the game set in the Portuguese capital during its reconstruction to propose an entertaining system of occupying spaces on a grid board. It continued with Bot Factory, which took the wonderful Kanban as its starting point (here is its tocho-review).

And now we get House of Fado, which takes The Gallerist as the design to simplify (here is its tocho-review). Just like in Bot Factory, Vital counts on the collaboration of João Quintela Martins. Let’s see how it behaves at the table, but not before thanking Maldito Games for providing the copy that makes this rambling—which started a while ago—possible.

In House of Fado, each player will put themselves at the helm of a small venue where customers can sit down to taste delicious delicacies while enjoying a show where a trio of artists perform the best fados, the expression of Portuguese music that is best known internationally.

Mechanically, we find ourselves with a worker placement game in which each player will have three pawns that they will place in the different action spaces of the main board and the personal board. In each of the first three turns of the game, each player will place one of these three pawns in an action space and, from their fourth turn onward, they will proceed to remove a pawn from an action space and place it in a different one.

The thing is that, in addition to the personal action space, players will only have seven different action spaces available on the board. And of course, if each player has three pawns at their disposal that must remain on their action spaces, the math doesn’t add up. In a four-player game, there are twelve pawns in total, and even if all players had one of their pawns in their personal action space, there would still be more pawns than action spaces on the main board.

This is where the mechanical concept that characterized The Gallerist comes into play, that is, the bumping actions. In The Gallerist, each player had a single pawn that moved between action spaces, being able to leave an assistant in the space they left behind to “keep it busy.” Action spaces were not blocked, as the active player could place themselves in any space other than the one they were starting from. But if they decided to activate an occupied space, the corresponding rival received a bonus.

The fundamental difference between House of Fado and The Gallerist is that in today’s game, as I already mentioned, the player has three pawns, so here the assistants merge with the main pawn—an idea that I find very interesting because it provides a lot of dynamism and, above all, a timing management that is key to the development of the game.

And the thing is, every time a player places a pawn in an action space occupied by a rival’s pawn, the rival will shift their pawn to one of the displacement spaces associated with the action space, obtaining highly interesting benefits such as musical notation tokens, leveling up already hired artists, money, or even customers.

Once a pawn is in a displacement space, it can no longer offer new benefits, and we will only be interested in keeping it there if we are not going to activate that action space on the next turn and we don’t want another player to enjoy the displacement space our pawn currently occupies, forcing future bumped pawns to choose a less interesting one.

What will players be able to do through these actions? Well, basically, four options: hire artists (to place them on the personal board, providing a musical notation token), attract customers (having to choose a subset of pawns of various colors to place them at one of the tables on the personal board) or a critic (who occupies a table by themselves), compose a fado (if the corresponding musical notation tokens are available), or promote an artist (as long as they have a higher level than the last one placed in the promotion spaces).

To these actions, we add the personal board action, which is the main way to get money and make our artists progress. For each customer in the restaurant at the time of activating this action space, the player will get a certain amount of coins for each customer pawn present in the venue. In addition, each of these pawns can help an artist progress, keeping in mind that grey pawns can support any artist, while black ones only advance singers, and brown ones advance those who play string instruments.

After offering a show, the player can let the artists go, earning victory points for it, as they need space to hire new artists to get new musical notation tokens and thus be able to compose new fados. Or, alternatively, try to promote them by placing them in one of the billboard spaces to gradually free up cubes from the development track (which increases income per customer and reduces the cost of attracting a critic, in addition to eventually freeing up the table with the largest capacity).

The players’ goal is, obviously, to try to accumulate the greatest possible amount of victory points, but there is an element that should draw players’ attention. I am referring to the goal stars. On the main board, there are five stars for which players compete. Three of them are awarded to the players who are the first to maximize an artist of each type. Another for the first to compose a third fado. And the fifth for whoever completes their development track first.

These stars are incredibly important because they offer an amount of victory points that can hardly be compensated for through an alternative path, since all players will do a bit of everything. It’s one of those games where you can’t dedicate yourself to one thing to the detriment of others, since all elements are intimately linked.

You need to hire artists to be able to make them progress. You need customers to get income to get artists. By hiring artists, you get musical notation tokens with which to complete fados. In this way, the game becomes a cycle in which we try to be as efficient as possible so as not to “waste” turns, since, in the end, the game poses a racing dynamic for these stars, as the final round is triggered when three of these stars have been claimed.

Well, with this you already have enough context for me to start talking to you about feelings and dynamics. The first thing that stands out about House of Fado is, just like in the previous proposals within this line of simplifications of Vital Lacerda designs, that we are looking at a medium-to-light weight eurogame, with few concepts and a breakneck game pace.

The actions are very atomic and the room for maneuver is not particularly wide. If we add that, although we have eight action spaces available, for practical purposes we will only have five, since out of the eight, three will be occupied at the start of the turn. In addition, six of the action spaces are double in the sense that what can be achieved in them is more or less the same type of element (although choosing between different sets).

That is why, as I said before, timing management is very important. First, to try to make the most of the bumping actions, placing pawns in spaces that we believe our rivals will want to activate in their next turns and, on the other hand, trying not to block ourselves by leaving a pawn too long in an action space and failing to realize that it will be the one we want to activate on the next turn.

When hiring artists, you have to balance the available money with their level and, above all, the musical notation token they offer to try to compose fados without wasting much time. Here it is also very important to monitor which fados our rivals are trying to compose so that, in case we are lagging behind in the race to get the musical notation tokens, we can focus on another type of composition.

It is essential to gradually remove cubes from the development track, since that is what will raise our income. In the early turns, it’s not as important because we will have a selection of unknown artists to introduce to the world whose hiring cost is low. But as we need to get higher-level artists to be able to promote them and place these development cubes, the cost of hiring these artists with a certain prestige will skyrocket.

Perhaps the biggest flaw of House of Fado is found in its scalability. It is clearly a game designed for four players. For starters, because there are majorities in the promotion spaces that reward the first three. Second, because with more pawns activating action spaces, the displacement rewards won’t be as juicy. And third, because the competition to get stars will be tighter. By this, I don’t mean that the game doesn’t work well at three or two, but rather that with each missing player, the tension will decrease.

Replayability might also fall a bit short. It doesn’t have any element that brings variability to the whole beyond the random order of the fado tiles, so everything is left in the hands of the players. Fortunately, the level of interaction is enough to maintain interest throughout the game. But in the end, it is a medium weight game without too many frills which, if brought to the table too many times in a short interval of time, will likely end up wearing thin.

Compared to Mercado de Lisboa, this House of Fado seems more interesting to me because it is a true simplification of The Gallerist (unlike Mercado de Lisboa, which took only a portion of its “father”) and most of the fundamental concepts are maintained. In fact, I think it could serve as a perfect introduction to understanding the flow of the original game, which can sometimes be somewhat opaque. And, even if it is not used for this purpose, as a medium weight game like Stone Age (here is its tocho-review), Coal Baron (here is its tocho-review), or Quetzal (here is its tocho-review), it fulfills its role in a more than acceptable way.

Let’s move on to production. We find a quite polished edition, with a reduced-size box containing a functional insert, where we find cardboard elements of good thickness and crisp punchouts that unsheet comfortably, wooden elements with good density and paint, and some plastic dice as level markers with arrows indicating which way to turn the die (a nice touch). The rulebook is well-structured and leaves no room for doubt.

As for the visual style, it stands out for a markedly retro and stylized aesthetic, inspired by soft cubism and mid-20th-century graphic design. The illustrations feature characters with geometric proportions, angular faces, and very clean lines that capture the expressiveness and mournful mysticism of Portuguese fado. The use of a warm and nocturnal color palette stands out, where the ochre, gold, and earth tones of gas lamps contrast with the deep blues and greens of the Portuguese night, achieving an intimate and welcoming atmosphere. Likewise, the visual identity of the game is enriched by meticulous care in cultural details, integrating geometric patterns that mimic traditional Portuguese tiles and the classic cobblestone pavement on the board. The result is an elegant, nostalgic graphic design with a strong personality that flawlessly unifies the cover art with the functional iconography of its components.

And let’s wrap things up. House of Fado presents itself as an agile and direct medium weight game that successfully distills the essence of The Gallerist into a more dynamic and contained experience. The game works very well thanks to subtle timing management and that constant tug-of-war for positional control, forcing players to maintain an efficient pace in a competitive race where neglecting a single element penalizes severely. The design bets on atomic turns and a very clean flow, ideal for those looking for continuous development without excessive complications. However, that same lightness and the linearity of its mechanics cause the spark of surprise to burn out quickly, diluting the general tension after a few games if it is deployed too continuously on the table. All in all, a correct and well-woven title that works adequately considering the target audience. For all this, I give it a…