This review of Fit To Print is featured on Episode 140 of The Five By. Check out the rest of the episode, which also features Legacy of Yu, Sea Salt & Paper, Flamecraft and Rise.
As someone who started their career in the newspaper world, it’s rare to see a board game with that exact theme. So, when I saw the Kickstarter for Fit to Print, I immediately backed it. When it finally arrived on my front door, like the morning edition of the daily paper, I was so excited to get the game on table, to see if this tile-laying real-time game captures the essence of what it’s like to assemble the front page of a newspaper before the time runs out.
Fit to Print, designed by Peter McPherson and with charming woodland creature artwork from Ian O’Toole, co-published by Flatout Games and Alderac Entertainment Group in 2023. It plays one to six people, in about 30 minutes. It’s a fast-paced and hectic puzzle (in the funnest way possible), the perfect game to squeeze into that small time frame when you’ve got a game day deadline. See what I did there?
In Fit to Print, players take on the roles of editors-in-chief assembling the front page of the tiny town of Thistleville’s newspaper to be balanced with news stories, photos and advertising. All of these items are represented in over 130-plus unique block tiles, which are placed in the middle of the table face down. The game goes through three rounds: Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with each subsequent newspaper front page getting larger.
The rounds are split up between the reporting phrase and the layout phase. Players can decide before playing if they want a frantic, standard or relaxed game, with the timer set at 3 minutes, 4 minutes or 5 minutes for the round. When gameplay begins, players simultaneously flip over tiles in the middle of the table (with one hand one at a time) and individually select which piece to add to their cardboard desk, and when a player decides they have gathered enough tiles to fill their front page, they move onto the layout phase of the game (all the while the clock is still running in case you forgot) and lay out tiles on their front page board. And yes, each player gets a cute little cardboard desk you assemble and take down with each game.
How you place these tiles matters on your board as they’ll score points at the end of each day. News stories come in three varieties: sports and entertainment, news, and business technology, respectively pink, blue and green tiles. Articles also come with moods: good news or bad news. The same types of tiles do not like sitting orthogonally next to each other. Photos want to be separated from other photos, as well as ads. The exception to this is news stories. You can place different types of stories next to each other, but you won’t score any points for placing business stories next to each other.
Just like real life editorial design, you want to maximize your space, and if you are unable to perfectly piece all the elements of your front page (or worse, didn’t get enough tiles to fill the space, which happens all the time), you’ll be penalized with negative points. The person with the largest continuous white space will receive the biggest penalty. Alternatively, if you take too many tiles, you’ll also get negative points but luckily, you’ll have them on your desk to publish in tomorrow’s front page.
Players also begin with a centerpiece, which has to be placed anywhere above the fold and covering the star printed on the board. The centerpieces offer different ways to score points if you meet their qualifications. Photos score points for news stories it’s adjacent to. You also want a balanced front page. Too many sad stories vs happy stories, and you’ll be docked points. Lastly, ads give you revenue, which will be added up after three days, and the person with the least revenue goes bankrupt, goes out of business and is ineligible to win.
Fit to Print also comes with advanced modes such as player powers and adding a breaking news deck, which places unique restrictions and bonuses for the day. The rulebook also comes with a family mode to reduce complexity, as well as a solo mode that comes with scenarios to track achievements. Lastly, the game also comes with rules for a newsroom mode, which supports 4 to 12 players in teams of 2. Within each team, one player is the reporter and the other the layout editor, and teams are spaced apart around 12 feet. I haven’t tried this yet but I can imagine the frenetic chaos of the reporter picking up tiles from a centralized table.
So how does Fit to Print stack up? It’s so freaking fun. That polyomino puzzle is a mechanism many of us are familiar with, but amping up the gameplay with the real-time aspect of it — genius! Every time I’ve played it, I like to yell out things like “30 seconds left” during gameplay, to which someone inevitably yells “Shut UP!” and a few other colorful words that I won’t be repeating for our family-friendly podcast. Once that clock starts for the round, the excitement fills the room and everyone is hyperfocused on picking up pieces to collect on your little cardboard desk
Sometimes your eyes are bigger than the allotted space for your front page. But then Sunday rolls around, and that extra space somehow exponentially makes A1 so much harder to fill up and fill it up well!
One of my friends described it as Galaxy Trucker with the misfortune of having your ship getting blown to bits. Here, you just scrap your front page after scoring your points and get ready for the next day’s edition. And the game’s artwork is just so cute and the characters endearing. I have a fondness for Boris Erenstein, the grizzled news reporter who started out as a copyeditor and has 20-years of journalism experience behind him. He looks like the type of guy who would make deadlines, even if you have just three minutes left. If you love real time tactile puzzle games, Fit to Print is for you.
And that’s Fit to Print! This is Meeple Lady for The Five By. You can find me on all the socials as Meeple Lady, or on my website boardgamemeeplelady.com. Thanks for listening. Bye!
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