For-Ex had the “why on earth did you buy this game” letter on back of the box. I’m exactly the kind of person to buy a game after reading that. I played the original four times before passing it on. It was a weird game, hard to understand, and while it looked nice, it was inconvenient to play.

I was tempted by another Amabel Holland title, Rayroads, and while buying that, noticed there’s For-Ex II: She Made Another One. It’s from 2024, but I had missed it completely. A friend of mine wanted a copy, so I added that to my order, and yesterday, we gave it a go.

It’s still very weird.

Everything’s streamlined a bit, though, and the new dry-erase components are a major improvement. Handling things is now much easier than it used to be. Understanding what to do is another thing; I’ve rarely seen so much head-scratching from a group of four experienced players.

I know I didn’t play well, as proven by my last place. I had a pile of Chinese yuan and managed to convert those to other currencies before the end of the game with a reasonable rate (trading 5 yuan to 5 euros, when the correct rate would’be been 12.5 yuan to 5 euros). That did unfortunately little good for me. I was a bit too broke in other currencies throughout the game.

There are clever things in this game. I quite liked the way you have five action tokens you can use to do the different actions in the game: four regular actions and one wild card. The spent tokens go to a queue, and whenever you do a Resolve action, you fill your tokens to five from the back end of the queue. Also if you end spend your last token, you get five from the queue. Those five can be anything, so you may end up severely limited in what you can do.

I’m looking forward to future plays. I’m pretty sure this is more of an interesting experience than a solid game, but right now it’s an experience I want to explore.