Backwards Is the Only Way Through It

Faraway showed up on the after-shift table maybe two months back, somebody’s new Essen pickup, and it’s stayed in rotation since because it’s the rare thing I can throw down between last call and the dishwasher finishing its cycle. Brett Sobol and Seth Van Orden designed it, Catch Up Games published it, and the box is small enough to live in my bag next to whatever paperback I’m carrying that week, three buttons rattling around in there and everything else cards. Eight rounds, that’s it. Each round you play a region card, expanding your tableau left to right, and if the number’s higher than the last card you played you get to take a sanctuary card too. Simple enough that I taught it to a line cook who’d never played anything heavier than Uno.

Here’s the part that actually got me, though: you have to think backwards. Flip your whole tableau face down at the end, then reveal it one at a time, right to left, last card first. So the card you played on turn eight, the one that felt like an afterthought, might be the thing that decides whether your turn-one card scores anything at all. First time through I built the whole line thinking forward like every other tableau game trains you to, and got maybe six points for my trouble. Took a couple plays for it to click, planning from the back end instead, and that dumb little inversion is the whole reason to own this.

It’s genuinely fast at two, which is where I mostly play it, standing at the counter with one other person after everybody’s clocked out. Bump it up toward four or five and it turns into something closer to multiplayer solitaire, everyone’s so deep trying to get their own reverse engine going that nobody’s even looking at anyone else’s tableau, never mind hate drafting to mess with it. And somebody’s inevitably sitting there double and triple checking whether what they built actually works, table just waiting on them to finish the math. Not a great look for a fifteen minute filler. No teardown to speak of, cards back in the box, done, which is most of why it’s still in the bag.

I’m not going to pretend the theme means anything, there’s no real theme here even if the rulebook tries to push a narrative on you, it’s set collection with a costume on. But the reverse scoring twist earns its keep every time I open the box, and at two players it never overstays its welcome.