Plenary Games have done an excellent job of reprinting this wonderful mind-bender of a game, with good quality components colourfully illustrated. Nice to see those wooden counters in here too.

NOTE: The red and orange counters are very similar in colour. Plenary Games have now replaced the orange counters with gold ones. If your set has orange counters, you can send them back to Plenary Games for free replacements.

Fresh Fish is a tile laying game. The object is to connect your retail outlets to the appropriate supply centres with as short a route as possible. During a players turn, the player has one of two choices, either claim a square for future development, or draw a tile and place it on one of the squares marked for development earlier.

However, although the laying of an office, apartment or park tile isn't a problem, drawing a retail outlet is. First, the retail outlet has to be auctioned in a blind auction. Players gather up some of their wooden money counters and all reveal them together. Highest bid gets to place the tile, and claim it for themselves. There are four different retail outlets, fish market, game shop, gas station and waste dumps. Each player can only own one of each, so once bought in the auction, a player cannot bid on that type again, so the last player to get a fish market, for example, gets it free, but then is limited as to where it can be placed, as by then, the prime sites are usually gone. One of the nice twists to this game.

What adds to the strategy of this game, though, is the expropriation rule. What this means is that every time a tile is played, players must check if the laying of that tile makes other squares unable to be built on. If this happens that square immediately becomes a street. Exactly what makes a square unplayable has been the subject of much discussion. To check this out, remember that all streets will eventually connect that outlets and supply centres must eventually have access to a street and all undeveloped squares and streets must always be connected.. By using these guidelines, you can 'prove' when a street must be built.

Once all tiles in the stack have been played, the scoring is done. This is simply counting how many street tiles there are between the supply centre and its outlets. All four routes for each player are then totalled, remaining money, if any, is deducted from the total and the player with the lowest score is the winner. Better. Faster. Cheaper.

I have played Fresh Fish with 2, 3 and 4 players and I've found it the most fun with 3 or 4 players, but is still certainly playable with 2 players, also. With more players there is more chance to spoil a players best laid plans and make what was once a short route into a very long route, even with the play of just one tile at the right time !

SUMMARY:
Some errata did creep into the rules and Plenary Games have provided full expanded rules and corrections at their website Plenary Games. Perhaps a future print run could include these expanded rules as standard. It did take us one or two plays before we could fully visualise exactly when a square must become a street, but this gem of a game is certainly worth perservering with. It's short playing time also had us wanting a second game straight away, it has that 'I can do better next time' quality. Go buy a copy whilst you still can!

Review by Brian