Fox & Flock is a neat little board game. Something you play for a half hour to kill some time. Sadly, it's very light on features, almost feeling like a demo for a full featured game. But for under $2.00 I *really* can't complain. Overall, I really enjoyed it and I hope the creators decide to make a chess game with the same aesthetics.

The Good:
++Fun game!
++Fantastic art style
++Fitting classical soundtrack
+Narrator is quite entertaining
+Local Multiplayer
+Steam Cards

The Bad:
-No online play
-Story mode is short (about 20 minutes; I guess you can think of it as a tutorial)
-Lack of game modes

The Ugly (which hopefully get patched) :
---Questionable AI (Dumb moves, or the AI just repeats the same two moves over and over, really dragging down the flow of the game)
---Game breaking glitches, requiring game restart
---Inability to use Steam overlay or take screenshots

The game rules are fairly simply. I am not going to try to explain them in detail here, it would be a waste of your time but if you are a fan of games like GO, Chess and Checkers you will be on familiar ground. If you are not a checkers pro, fear not; there is a quick tutorial game that teaches everything you need to know about the rules in about three moves.

Throughout the Story mode you play as both the Fox and the Flock. Each round is tied together by voice acted narrative poetry. Which is good, the voice acting and poetry, both. The Story is to-the-point but interesting, not that it takes much to push an hour of gameplay. The Music is excellent, as it is time-appropriate Classical that really sets the mood. The orchestrated score contrasts nicely with the subtle blood stains that accumulate each time a fox eats (jumps) a member of the Flock. The simple hand drawn art style also lends well to the overall Ball-Room Era theme of F&F. It really looks like you are playing the game on the page of an old weathered book or something of the like.

The real challenge is to be had in the Quick-Game mode. The Quick Game mode is the place to go if you are looking to crank up the difficulty or play a two player match, locally. The Story Mode was quite short, to be sure. None the less, I found Fox and Flock rather enjoyable... and the story mode even has a twist ending... which was more than what I was expecting. Well worth the two Dollar Price tag.

Old board game with story tutorial.

While you will probably enjoy playing this old game[en.wikipedia.org] more against an actual human on an actual board (or perhaps via Internet and the Tabletop Simulator), this game teaches anyone (and thanks to full voice-overs, that means children, too) the basics of this game. There's the "tutorial", and then there's a short campaign with poetic narration; it took me half an hour to complete.

If you have no one to play with, you can challenge the AI to a quick game. Its difficulty ranges from "dolt" to "aristocrat". I played a classic game as fox, and the aristocratic AI not only happily repeats the same moves forever (which should ordinarily be a stalemate), it also did some fairly dumb mistakes in the endgame that gave a certain victory away. So there seems room for improvement.

Fox & Flock is a fun way to learn a classic game, and priced accordingly. Recommended.

+ classic board game
+ cute
+ cheap (US$0.5 @ 73% off) for 3 hours gameplay
- no online multiplayers
- you can never be lose as flock if you are an experienced player.

The price is justified for such a simple game.

The Fox & Flock is a short strategy board game - easy to learn and a joy to play as a fun distraction after you've killed every alien, zombie and soldier in all your 'bigger games'!

So what is it? The concept is simple enough: a peg board with pieces - one is a Fox who must try to take all the other pieces by jumping over them into a space (just like checkers/draughts). Meanwhile, the player of the Flock must try to keep enough alive to populate the bottom 3 x 3 peg area at the bottom of the board. if the Flock succeeds, they escape. However, if the Fox leaves your Flock with less than nine members, you don't have enough animals left to win and so the Fox wins the game. The short campaign adds little twists to each new level, as well as letting you try your hand at playing the Fox or the Flock depending on the level you are on.

The art style is so clever - an absolute joy. I found myself wishing there was somehow a 3D version of the game where I could walk around the characters just to look at them! The classical music makes a perfect score to the tale, told in rhyme. After you've completed the campaign, you could always go back to see if you can do better next time, or you can opt to play a 'quick game' instead of playing through the campaign. This is not going to be one of those games that will take up hours of your time, but it's a fabulous little coffee-break type of game and at this miniscule price it would be criminal not to get it.

Recommended!

Fox and Flock is a lovely adaptation of a classic strategy board game that has been around for centuries. This version plants the core game itself inside a dark tale rich with comedy and tragedy ~ uninvited Guests at a ball.

I greatly enjoyed the production value of the game; the artwork was quite well done and the choice of baroque period music fits very well with the story.. My only minor complaint was that the perspective of the board at times makes it difficult to see where pieces are or where they are not, and it would have been nice if the board had been rotated on a slight angle to prevent this.

All in all I Highly recommend this to strategy lovers and anyone else who might appreciate something a little more casual than your typical action-oriented game.

A deliciously sweet board game, no doubt, but a very poor and tactically-cheap computer game, Fox and Flock has moments where it all comes together - art style, music, bold strategic gambits! - but tragically more times where the AI resorts to cheap repetitive moves to force your fox to do something that is against your interest. Othertimes (when you are the flock) the foxes "cheat" by moving multiple illegal moves or your flock pieces refuse to move into empty slots even when the move is legal. In just the first few games of the campaign multiple issues popped up as regards gameplay, and even more issues with s-l-o-w animations and wonky cursor detection that become infuriatingly bothersome as I progressed. There is a great core here that could be a fantastic game, but it is limited by its execution and the limitations of the game type.

Recommended because it is charming, engaging, and enjoyable. But with the caveat that its price IS reflective of the return you will get from it.

If you like halatafl (fox & geese), you’ll like Fox & Flock, since it is nothing more than a video game adaptation of the classic board game with a reasonable AI and no multiplayer.

Fox & Flock had a simple goal: create a video game version of the old medieval board game of halatafl, also known as fox & geese.
If you haven’t met it yet, halatafl is a fairly easy game, sort of a combination of checkers and GO, where the large amount of geese are trying to trap the foxes in a corner while the foxes try to eat them. It also has the same fundamental flaw, whereas it is easy to reach a stalemate.

This video game only added a short, roughly 30-minutes, somewhat dark and baroque story mode on it. It’s not much, but the AI seems decent to entertain you for a few minutes or so, since there is no multiplayer to play against humans.

It's difficult to criticize cheap games, but I found myself not pleased with my overall experience of the game. The length of the main part of the game is to be expected, so no problems there. However, there is so little replay value even with the quick game option. No multiplayer is a glaring example. My experience with the game in both story and quick play has been to repeat the same moves repeatedly until the ai eventually makes a mistake. If the aim of the game is to win, then I find this to be the best tactic. Of course, the potential exists to not play like this, but also increases the chances of losing on the hardest difficulty.

On the topic of replayability, there is also no reason to play the game again. No achievements, no collectibles, no unlockables. The only incentive currently is steam trading cards (the reason my playtime is higher than 1h). Perhaps this will change if the developer wishes to add content to the game in the future. It's quite easy to see features being implemented such as new visual elements, new music, new gameplay modes, multiplayer, character skins, challenges and so on. Maybe one day there will be new features or options.

The aesthetics of the game are certainly interesting, including the opera style theme music. Initially, the game is quite unique, but after ten minutes the specialness of playing something different was already gone, as I found myself repeating the same combination of movements. Is a unique aesthetic enough to justify purchasing a game that will potentially last between 20-60 minutes? Despite the price, I would say it is not. The game certainly isn't bad by any means, I just don't believe that what it currently offers justifies the (admittedly low) cost of the game.

P.S, I also dislike not being able to turn off music or sounds. After having the game on for 3 hours for steam trading cards (I have something of an ocd about booster pack eligibility), I now hate opera forever.

I'm a huge fan of board games for my computer. Anything I can fire up quickly, learn how to master, and just keep for those days when my more heavy duty games aren't keeping my interest is always something I'm willing to add to my list.

I've never played the game that inspired Fox & Flock so I made sure I played close attention to the tutorial. This is a very quick game to learn and I have a special love for things that come from the 1800s so color me already interested.

The music is very relaxing and puts you in the ballroom mood while you'll be very entertained with the charming place markers of the flock and foxes. (Go foxes, uhm color me biased!)

There is a bit of a storyline during your adventures if you choose not to indulge in quick games and there is a lovely little narration with voice acting that I did enjoy. It was something that most people overlook in games like this so I enjoyed it. (Fur standing on end... Thank you for keeping in character the entire time, too. People really do overlook things like this.)

There's no flashy graphics to give you a migraine. There's no complicated keystrokes. This is a game you can unwind with and include within your big titles just to have to wind down with...of course until the AI figures out what your game is and you're left cursing at the screen. Nothing painful unless we count your self-inflicted pain when that turkey in a ballgown has blocked your path to the noms. Multiple times. Accept your fate, turkey. Just accept your fate.

I guess that would be my gripe. Much like tic-tac-toe, there's more of a "let's go for deadlock" than a winning combination. There weren't too many risks the AI was willing to make in order to win, making it so difficult that I had to frequently restart...

Which leads to one HUGELY GLARING DETAIL. This game has a major bug. If dialogue fails to intiate between matches to tell you if you're foxes or flocks(es haha rhyme) or to announce who has won, you will freeze and you will not proceed. The game will not save what has happened. This has occurred a few times to me so far. Now it's not frustrating as I'm fine to replay the level. No harm, no foul! (Or should we say fowl? haha flock, haha animals, oh I'm way too tickled with this one!) But that is a little annoying so I hope that's fixed soon. This COULD deter people from downloading because if you spent a long time on a particularly difficult match, you're not going to want to replay that again.

Bugs aside, this game really fulfills a lot of things that I do love and I find myself selfishly saying to download the game despite the buggyness and just play through it because it really is fun to waste an hour just moving those animal pegs around.

Also, a fox does deserve a good meal, after all. How dare they look down upon the foxes? You all taste good with ketchup and ale in the end!