The Finest Fish Review

All the fun of goldfish with none of the flushing at the end.

The Finest Fish from Last Night Games is a simple drafting game where players are building out patterns of scales for their fish. Each round, players will select one of the sets of scales available they can then place them on their fish or they can trade a scale for one in the fishbowl or purchase a pattern card. The cards all represent specific objectives and completing them nets you 3 points at the end for each completed one. This continues until someone completely fills their fish and then final scoring will begin. You get 3 points for completed cards, 1 point for each black scale, and 1 point for each scale in a cluster. A cluster consists of 3 or more together. Whoever has the most points is the winner.

The Good: Similar to their other game, Life of a Chameleon, this is an excellent family game with a unique theme. I love that it's one you can teach in about 5 minutes and people will get a grasp of the concepts quickly and without a ton of questions. I like that in a game that I teach. There's also a lot of room for error because you can mess up your patterns or be forced to abandon them completely. The components are really nice and having 4 different types of fish really gives the game an extra layer that I liked.

The Okay: There is a fair amount of luck involved here because you're blindly drawing from a bag. The trade aspect is nice but the fishbowl doesn't always have ones you'd rather trade for. This can force you to change directions a lot or try to focus on clusters and black scales only.

The Not So Good: The dual layered fish boards are great, but some of them didn't get cut as well as I'd like. When they start to fill up the scales will not always stay level and some will go flying off of the fish, which is probably not what you want out of your fish. It has no effect on gameplay at least.

Final Thoughts: The Finest Fish is a great tile placement game. It's one that I want to play with my girls when they get older and won't try to eat the scales but it's also something that I could pull out with my friend group (they probably won't try to eat the scales) and still have a great time playing. It's not the deepest game in the world but it's a perfect quick-ish game and a ton of fun overall.

Thanks to Last Night Games for providing a review copy.