Antifascist Tooth Fairy
- Board's Eye View
- 6 minutes ago
- 3 min read
E V Debs' Antifascist Tooth Fairy is perhaps the antidote to Secret Hitler, which some misguided critics condemned as celebrating Fascism. Mind you, this game is likely to attract just as many critcisms because it's predicated on violent protest. In Antifascist Tooth Fairy, the 2-5 players are standing up to Fascists by knocking their teeth out!
Antifascist Tooth Fairy then is a tongue-in-cheek dexterity game that puts the teeth in Antifa. It's fully cooperative and you can easily push the player count if you want to include more than five players. Each turn a new Fascist card will come out to be placed on a small, medium or large stand. The player whose turn it is has a fist on the end of an elasticated string attached to a ring, and with the ring on their finger they propel their plastic fist at a standee to try to knock it over. That's pretty easy with the small stands and not too difficult with the medium-sized stands but it is fiendishly hard for cards on the largest stands; merely knocking them along doesn't count for anything - you have to actually tip them over. Depending on which difficulty level you're playing, there will be spaces for five or six Fascists; if a turn ends with the board full, the Fascists have won and you all lose the game. You need to have knocked over nine Fascists to win the game, with your successes marked by advancing a brick along a track. You also get to draw teeth from a bag...
Successful or not, and even if your flying fist misses a Fascist altogether, the police take a dim view of street violence. The game represents that by advancing a pig on the players' collective charge sheet for every punch you throw. You can try as many punches as you like but if you take more than three on your turn, the fourth and further punches advance the pig two places on the charge sheet track. There are 21 spaces on this track, with the 22nd space representing players' incarceration... If you get a further charge while on this space or if you end your turn with the pig at the incarceration space, you all lose.
Don't forget the teeth you knocked out when you successfully bashed a Fascist. These can be spent to reduce charges, tho' only if there are no Fascists on the board that show the pig symbol. Spend four teeth and you can draw a 'mutual aid' card. The majority of these are favourable but almost a quarter have a negative effect, tho' all those cards let you draw again for free. And neither Fascists nor the police make it easy for protesters; if any of the standees have the 'ticks' symbol, the cost of mutual aid cards is raised to a prohibitive eight teeth!
Tho' it appears to encourage violence, Antifascist Tooth Fairy isn't intended as a political manifesto. Don't take it any more seriously than Secret Hitler. There's a strong push-your-luck element and there are tactical choices to be made over which standee to go for; the Fascists on small stands are obviously easier to knock over but it can be dangerous to ignore those on the hard-to-knock-over large stands if they lumber you with pig and tick icons that make it much harder to make use of your teeth.
As you might guess, this isn't a game of deep strategy; it's all about the dexterity of how effective players are in punching out Fascists. For most of the members of the Board's Eye View team at least, chucking a fist on a string proved to be a slowly acquired rather than inherent skill, so we racked up quite a run on the charge sheet before we finally got to grips with the Fascists. The rules suggest a 30-45 minute playing time but on your initial plays at least it may well be game over and a win for the Fascists in 15-20 minutes.
Antifascist Tooth Fairy is due to launch on Kickstarter on 19 May. Click here to find out more - and without risk of being placed on a police watchlist :-)
