Figment and Fruit Fight – The CMYK Magenta Line, Part 2

Last time I examined Fives and Duos, the first two titles in CMYK’s new Magenta line of card games. This time we’re looking at Figment and Fruit Fight, once again two previously published releases that have been remastered and brought into visual alignment with the rest of this series. The decision on which games to target for this set have been excellent, as they’ve all hit upon a similar broad classic appeal while presenting interesting ideas and unique concepts. Each of these card games could grow to become family past-times, the type of activity you return to for comfort and familiarity.

Figment is the most unusual of the entire Magenta series. It’s a reworking of Wolfgang Warsch’s 2018 card game Illusion, with unique artwork and a new rules framework. This odd design asks players to put cards in ascending order based on the percentage of a specific color. Yeah, it’s weird. That’s also why it’s intriguing.

Unlike Illusion, this is a cooperative game. One player flips a random card which tells you which color you’re concerned with. Then, another deck is shuffled, and cards are revealed one at a time. They’re bizarre images with various abstract, typically asymmetric designs of spheres and lines and quirky shapes. The group must decide how to order these cards based on the specific color they were tasked with.

There’s a beauty in Figment’s collision of utterly simplistic rules with mind-bending player execution. You can sit someone down and teach this game without any instruction. All you need is to guide them.

“Right, the only color we’re worried about is silver.” You then reveal an image card at the start and place it in the center of the table. Nothing to do yet. Then you flip a second card.

“Does this card have less or more silver than that previous one?”

There’s some discussion. Some may point out that a couple of the circles aren’t entirely whole, and a large amount of their area is cut-off by a different shape. Often the image is deceiving and another perspective can help you avoid overlooking an important characteristic. It can get very tricky when comparing two cards that are close in percentage. Players will pick up the card, rotate it, point out subtleties in the design.

Subsequent cards can be placed anywhere in the sequence, including between two previous selections. You can never go back and re-order things – unlike, say, ito – so each decision must be carefully considered. After the final card is locked in, you begin flipping them over starting with either the or highest concentration of the assigned color. The back of each displays the percentage of surface space covered by each color. You stop as soon as a flipped number of your assigned color is not correctly sequenced, or you complete the run of five.

A point system facilitates the cooperative structure by providing a goal, but it’s entirely secondary to the experience. This is one of those games that some people may criticize and undermine its nature by describing it as an activity more so than a game. It’s interesting because Illusion had more structure and rules, thus avoiding this contention more readily.

I find Figment fascinating. But I also find it fleeting. This is very much the type of thing that is most striking with first contact. It’s a game that does well with new players, particularly casual participants that had no idea games could be so weird and outside the structure of traditional fare.

There’s a quality to Figment that reminds me of The Usual Suspects or The Prestige. It’s the type of game that I want to show someone who had no idea it existed and then live vicariously through their initial reaction. The barriers being so shallow help the cause, as you can complete a play in five minutes or so. Who’s going to say no to five minutes?

But Figment is also a bit of a one-trick pony. While there is skill involved, particularly a skillset that is not often developed or stretched, it’s not a process of nuanced decision making, emergent narrative, or exciting social interaction. There’s no methodology for evolving gameplay and there’s no real path forward into the design where new flourishes or details may be discovered. This is not something I would play often, instead only coming off the shelf for those new player opportunities, as well as perhaps when a brief sliver of time needed to be filled and I desired something quirky.

Figment’s strength is in asking you to do something you’ve never done before. It forces you to look at the world in a new way, and it’s incredibly interesting by doing so. But it’s a fling, not something I’d ever be wed to or consider for commitment.

Fruit Fight was the lure. It’s what sparked my interest in the Magenta line. It thus may not surprise you to learn that this is a Reiner Knizia game. It’s an almost identical re-release of his 2021 push-your-luck card game No Mercy, which in turn is a re-working of the earlier Cheeky Monkey. This thing’s had some time to simmer, and it’s permutated into an endowment of blurred fruit flung across the table.

This is the simplest design of the lot. On your turn you receive these fuzzy cards and must grapple with the concise yet vivid decision of hitting or holding. In the spirit of Blackjack, you can keep turning produce off the top of the deck, stopping when you’re satisfied with the bounty laid before you. The trouble is that if you draw a duplicate of the same fruit, you bust and lose all of it. There’s slight variation in odds based on particular cards, and certainly some gamesmanship in counting what’s been burned off.

Here’s the best part of the game. You don’t immediately score your foodstuff when you halt. You only score the cards that remain in front of you when it gets back around to your turn again. This is because, quite obviously, they can be stolen.

Like a minute razorblade buried in the flesh of an orange, your cards can be turned against you to inflict unexpected suffering. If another player draws a fruit card that you already possess, they steal all such fruit of that type. And of course, they will not score those stolen cards until their following turn, so they must weather the storm and hope no one steals their now elongated stack. At large player counts, these fruit stores can become enormous as they’re passed around several times.

This theft is roughly half the game. It’s the most interesting portion as the other is the almost too simple push-your-luck affair that is light on flavor. The flecks of life delivered through the friction of thievery elevate this game just enough to foment interest. It’s very direct in what it’s trying to accomplish, and it frankly succeeds.

There is an unfortunate quality here in that it plays best with fewer players. Three is the perfect count, with degradation as it reaches a full table of five. The reason this is the case is that it grows more chaotic at the large end, but not in a satisfying way. As your sense of agency diminishes, the game almost floats away in a malaise of disinterest. This light anarchy would feel more fulfilling if the game leaned into it some more. It’s not wild enough to inspire laughter or hearty bullying when someone flops on their face, and it’s just a little too distant to really inspire thoughtful play.

Most surprising is that it lacks the subtle layers often found in Knizia’s work. I can compare this to a similarly straightforward design in Llama, a game which while aimed at families, contains multiple clever marks to be extracted through repeated engagement. Fruit Fight seems to lack this nuance and specialty. This leaves it in a listless land where there’s an obvious baseline appeal, but there’s not obvious magnitude.

Another adverse condition is that it’s frankly overshadowed by a release that exited 2024 with a great deal of acclaim. Flip 7, an Op Games title from Eric Olsen, captures the same lean and direct Blackjack inspired experience with that dash of wanted chaos. Flip 7 is more frenetic and impulsive, utilizing cards with special effects to ratchet up the tension and humor. It lands more boisterously, and thus more memorably.

Fruit Fight does carve out a niche as a solid straightforward affair that can be plopped in front of a group of non-hobbyists and fire off with relative confidence, but it never explodes or reaches the upper echelon of instinctual magic the best in this style have to offer. Still, I can enjoy Fruit Fight with any manner of human being. We can engage in what it has to offer knowing we will both come away entertained. From the perspective of admiring its simplicity and traditional foundation, this is a game that really nestles into the Magenta mission statement. You could pull it out a decade from now and no one would know the year it was designed. There’s certainly a beauty there.

From the moment I put my hands and eyes on these four boxes, I’ve really wanted to talk about the Magenta line as a product. I don’t normally examine games under this lens, as I don’t want to lean too hard into commodifying them, instead, viewing the potential of board games as cultural artifacts of human expression. But the most interesting trait of these card games are their physical form. This is the cultural impact of Magenta.

I deeply miss physical media. It’s one of the most heartening aspects of tabletop games, and it’s a characteristic that’s quickly evaporated from other mediums of art. The other main physical form many still collect are books. Yes, even those are collapsing into 1s and 0s, but the bookshelf has not been totally obliterated. There’s a humanistic power in owning even a small collection of curated texts, and the medium has proved far more impervious to extinction than film and music.

It’s interesting, then, that the shape of a Magenta game bears the striking resemblance of a hardback book. They fit naturally on a shelf, splitting the difference between a tchotchke and a novel. By mimicking the contours of a book, they seek to capture that quality of timelessness. There’s a stark difference between Fruit Fight’s bright and blocky box intended to sit on its spine, and the typical peg-board packaging of a mainstream card game. The chosen games in this line also completely blend with this aesthetic, offering titles that will remain resilient to aging.

The downside with this series is that each title is quite expensive for the contents. They’re also large and inefficient, a quality which may hamper their rate of adoption among hobbyists with overcrowded shelves. I imagine they are primarily aimed at less inundated gamers, people whose collections are a step beyond Uno and Monopoly but maybe have never heard of Board Game Geek.

Another point that has arisen in the wake of this series is the maturation of CMYK. They’ve become the contemporary equivalent of old Days of Wonder, a firm intent on a focused release schedule that places quality above quantity. While they’ve pushed beyond Days of Wonder’s solitary release per calendar year, they’ve remained relatively restrained in a crowdfunding world that sees publishers endlessly publishing to keep the money coming in. You can tell that each of their games are developed as hopeful evergreen titles, with the care and precision that entails.

The Magenta line is such a swing for the fences. As I’ve pointed out, I believe the strength in this series is in its established standard and its unified presence. By selecting pre-existing games that were difficult to track down as imports in the North American market, the team was freed up to refine the aesthetic properties of the series. This visual presence is subsumed in the fantastic physical shape of the product and its nod towards literature. Holistically, there’s a seal of quality that can be derived from this set of four card games, and it bodes well for future releases.

 

A review copy of each of these games was provided by the publisher.

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