Not a-frayed of a little competition? Then unleash your inner animal in our Frayed Ally review!

While walking around PAX Aus 2023 this year I found a brand new game about deception, strategy and fighting your friends. Frayed Ally by Button Fox Crafts is a character-based party card game where you take the role of a cute little creature in an every man for himself style game. So sleeve up and check out this upcoming party game in our Frayed Ally review!

Yes, that is Christopher Sabat, voice of Vegeta/Piccolo of DBZ and Zoro of One Piece narrating the trailer.

Frayed Ally Review – How to Play

Frayed Ally is played with 3-6 players with 3 different roles to fill: Rival, Villain and Minion. Much like other character based games, everyone starts by picking their character at random, however, even after that, the only person who knows your character is you. You also get 2 action cards and these stay in your hand until they’re used or placed in the discard pile.

There are 3 action card types to use, offensive, defensive and traps. Offensive and defensive cards are fairly straight forward as they’re used for dealing damage and deflecting damage respectively. However, trap cards are the bomb! No, literally they’re a bomb. Once you draw one from the deck you reveal it and take damage. Unless you’re the minion who is good at hanging onto those traps.

 Each round can be broken down into 5 stages:

1. Draw a card
2. Use an action card (offensive cards can only be used now whereas defensive cards can be used at any time.)
3. Attack another player for only 1 damage
4. Re-action; This is the time to use those defensive cards!
5. End and pass the turn to the left.

Once a player is down to 1 life point their character card is flipped up and revealed. This is where they can get stronger. Each character has it’s own unique ability that can be used once they’re flipped over and only once per flip! If the player gains any life, they get to flip themselves back over. However, if a player takes that last point of damage, they’re out for good and as a bonus, the player who took them out gets to take all their unused cards from their hand.

There are three ways to win. Win as a team of the Villain and Minion, defeat the Villain or be the last Rival standing and as the cards are given out randomly and in secret, you never know how the game will play out!

Frayed Ally Review – Presentation

The first thing you’ll notice with the art is how cute it is. Each character is a little chibi anthropomorphised animal, each one the creation of Button Fox Crafts that were used with their clothing line. Apart from that, the action cards have a nice stylised graffiti look to them, something just a little different.

I also recommend checking out the miniature standees of the characters that you can get for the game. Something nicer to represent your character once you’re found out!

Support the Kickstarter and you can grab these adorable standees!

Frayed Ally Review – Conclusion

While I didn’t get to spend much time with Frayed Ally, I found it very fun to play against some strangers. The game takes roughly 15-30 minutes depending on how many people jump in but as the characters can be completely random, it adds plenty of replayability to the game. All you have to do is shuffle up and go again for an all new round with different ways to play.

If you want to support Button Fox Crafts and their fun game about strategy and beating up your friends, I recommend heading over to the Frayed Ally Kickstarter which is live now and supporting them. We need to support more Aussie creators so we can see more of their ideas on the shelves!

So, why should you jump into the fray?

• Plenty of replayability
• A new twist on these sort of party games
• You want to support Aussie creators

But why might you want to hang back?

• Not your style of game
• You don’t like fighting your friends

For more information on Frayed Ally, be sure to check out the official website! And for more things tabletop, dive into more of our boardgame reviews and join us over on the Qualbert Discord to chat about the latest releases.