Imagine if fairytales were less fairytales and more fantasy comedy with just a mild dash of violence. You’ll find yourself in the world of Fable Wars, a match-3 puzzle RPG themed after fairytale characters. With a bit of gacha luck, you’ll find yourself fighting side by side with the likes of Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Snow White as the Magic Mirror’s shattering causes clones of everyone to wreak havoc. Don’t worry, the Magic Mirror ain’t dead since you can use him too.
Akin to other match-3 games such as Cookie Run: Puzzle World, you have a board loaded with blocks of differing colors. If you have the same colored blocks touching each other, you can tap it and the blocks go away. In this particular game, blocks that you destroy damage the enemy on top of the screen, while powering your heroes’ skills so they can hurt the enemy even more.
In this comprehensive Fable Wars beginner’s guide, we’ll be listing down some tips, tricks and strategies that’ll help you put those bad guys in front of you six feet into the dirt. Not to mention making the most of what money the game gives you.
1. Victory Requires Preparation
In the first wave, do your best to set up a huge combo while plinking away at the enemy with smaller attacks or skills. Save up some cross blades or multiple one directional blades ready to hit each other, though don’t hesitate to use a few of them to kill the first wave. Once the first wave is down, you can nuke the second wave with the combo you saved.
Then use up the mana you’ve accumulated from that one blow on either any unlucky survivors. The reason why you set up combos in the first wave is because that’s the safest time to do so; You have the HP to take a few hits while setting up, and you’ll want the next wave dead ASAP in case your heroes are badly injured.
2. Smash!
Don’t hesitate to use your smashes in the Portal missions. You get four of them each day, and early on you’re gonna need that extra reward money to upgrade your heroes and such, or to stock up on items in case the levels start kicking your butt. And since the power jumps between levels are pretty huge, you won’t have a choice in the matter anyway!
3. Daily Summon Scrolls Aren’t Worth Gems
You might get impatient and use your gems for the Daily Summon 10-roll. For the love of all that is good and beautiful, don’t do that. Save for the 8 Epic Summon scrolls in the Shop instead. It’s one of the better deals for a free-to-play player, superior even to the Epic Summon 10-roll located directly in the gacha menu. When you count how many gems per hero you spend, you’re spending 150 gems per roll instead of 270 gems per roll with the gacha menu’s 10-roll.
While you can only buy it once a day, it doesn’t matter to a free player since they aren’t likely to get 1200 gems multiple times in a single day anyway. Besides, you can buy bundles for Daily Summon Scrolls using Coins too.
4. Price Gouging Buffs
Buff items are immensely expensive from the shop, often reaching upwards to 100k coins per piece. That kind of cash should be spent leveling your team so you wouldn’t need the darn things anyway! They are also not strong enough to get you unstuck from a hard fight or to make up for the board not giving you the blocks you want.
Just like the Daily Summon Scrolls, you’re far better off grabbing them from missions and fights instead of the Shop. By the time you can buy them, you probably already have enough gold to level your team up a couple of times. Never buy these things, unless you’re already so high level and immensely rich that you have a ton of gold to burn.
5. Don’t Toss High Star Dupes, And Don’t Toss Your Tablet
So you went into the Epic summon gacha and got a ton of the same hero instead of the Queen Of Hearts you’ve been eye-ing. Before you toss your tablet at someone’s head, know that you can use dupes to Ascend heroes at 3 stars above. Doing so raises their star level by one. This is a far superior option to wasting perfectly good 3 star heroes as upgrade fodder, as a single hero going up a star can give more power than if you wasted it to level up.
Not to mention you can use 1 and 2 star heroes to level up anyway since those cannot be ascended, stay weak forever, and are given to you like hotcakes. One last thing, you CAN use dupes in the same team, for whatever tactical benefit you may see in doing so.
6. You Can Aim Attacks
Who a normal block destruction attack will hit is determined by where on the board you destroy blocks, and where exactly you tap. If an enemy is to the left of the screen, blocks destroyed on the left will hit them, shown by a projectile flying upward from where you tapped.
Don’t worry about missed attacks too much though. If you miss an attack by destroying blocks where enemies aren’t around, the projectile turns around to give your heroes more mana than they normally would after hitting something.
7. You Can Also Aim Skills
You can tap an enemy to pick them as a target for most damage dealing skills. This is useful for focusing a target down. The fewer enemies there are in front of you, the less damage the enemy team deals for very obvious reasons. You can also check the number on an enemy’s corner to determine if they are about to attack. If you see that they’re on 1, and on low HP, you can kill them with a skill and cancel their attack!
8. All The Colors Of The Wind
There are 5 elements within the game, determined by their color. Fire, Water, Nature, Darkness and Light. Not only do all characters correspond to a color, but so do the blocks on the board. Characters of a certain color can only charge up from the same color as their block. To add to this, every block only does damage if a character of their respective color is in your team.
While Fire, Water and Earth form a lovely rock-paper-scissors triangle (Fire torches Nature, Nature drinks Water, Water douses Fire), Darkness and Light are weak against each other, turning fights between them into high-damage rocket tag.
9. Reliable Rainbow Consistency
The way elements work means while it may be useful to specialize your squad in one element if an enemy team is mostly made of a single element from Fire, Water or Nature, this is far more dangerous to do against a team that is mostly Light or Dark. If you have an all Dark team and the enemy is all Light, or vice versa, the enemy always does more consistent damage than you do because their attacks are on a timer.
Meanwhile, you are beholden to RNG based on what blocks the game hands to you, and if the game doesn’t give you any Dark blocks, you’re in deep trouble. In that case, you’re better off with a team of all colors so you can do damage as consistently as the enemy team. Especially since all of the elemental triangle elements do neutral damage against Light and Dark, and vice versa.
10. Tricolor Terror
If you cannot avoid missing a color in your team, then three colors with at least two heroes for two of the colors is the absolute minimum your team needs. While two colors on the field will be rendered utterly useless, having multiple heroes of the same color powers up said color, making it hit harder.
Not to mention each color that has two heroes assigned to it is suddenly worth twice the mana due to how mana distribution works. You will have to play smarter and be a bit luckier to take advantage of the power such a team gives though. Successful attacks will hit harder, but a field full of colors you lack heroes for is a quick way to end up with salt-induced kidney stones. With that in mind, managing a team with anything less than three colors outside of the Tower is suffering.
11. Get In Formation!
The positioning of your heroes and the positioning of the enemy is more important than one would initially expect. Certain characters have skills that heal or buff characters adjacent to them in the deck. Some characters have skills that hit a primary target then lightly damage or debuff enemies next to the victim.
Make sure you read what your character can do and position them accordingly. An early example you can learn from is Red Riding Hood’s grandma, Granny. She is a healer you can get from the story battles. She heals herself and any allies directly next to her, so do not ever put her in the first or last slot of your deck. If you do, she’ll only be able to heal one teammate instead of two. In any other position, she can heal two people at once.
12. In PvP, Get In Formation Harder!
When making an Arena PVP defense team, remember that they will be placed in a chevron formation. The closer the character is to the center, the further forward they are placed, protecting teammates further out to the edge.
Make sure you put your squishier or harder hitting heroes at the furthest left and right, and the tankiest guy you have in the center. For one thing, you absolutely do not want the middle guy to die first. An empty mid is an easy free spot for the attacking player to start charging their team’s skills by deliberately missing block attacks.
Not to mention the ones furthest to the edge can only really be hit by blocks near the edge of the board, while whoever is in the middle takes up a much greater space on the board in terms of how many blocks can hit them. If you have any supports, it might be best to put them in between the tank and whoever’s in the edge, so they can protect more people with their skills while being guarded by the tank.
13. Skills Care Not Who They Hit
Don’t bother aiming most of your skills based on elemental rock paper scissors. Unlike block-based attacks, skill attacks don’t do elemental damage. Unless specifically stated otherwise in their description, a fire hero’s skill will do the same damage against a water or nature target. Instead, aim your offensive skills at either the biggest threat on the enemy team, whoever’s almost dead, or in the case of debuff skills or if multiple foes are close to death, whoever’s about to attack.
14. Desperate Strike
Even if all the heroes on your team of a respective element is dead, their color of block will still do full damage against the enemy. On the other hand, not having a color in your party at all causes a color to be entirely useless other than for setting up combos. This is another reason to have a fully colored team considering how painful it is when you can’t use a block to cause damage. Just remember not to miss a dead hero’s color block attacks since they can’t charge up their mana anymore.
15. High In The Tower
In the Tower missions, you will find yourself against a boss that hits really hard but attacks very rarely, since they are only capable of using Skills. Unfortunately, this applies to you too! The tower is all about charging your team’s skills then skillspamming your target. On top of that, there is also a bunch of unwanted blocks in the form of monsters in the field that you must destroy as a mission objective. It is absolutely imperative you keep an eye on your mana gauges and use your skills as soon as you’re able.
It is very easy to get overly focused on clearing out skeletons and owls and forget your team is ready to attack. Here, a team with only three colors as opposed to a full rainbow team can truly shine. There are often limitations as to what color you’re allowed to bring here. And the way mana is charged, blocks charge everyone of the same color equally as opposed to their power being split between multiple heroes. Do your best to finish as many of these missions as your party can, since the rewards are pretty good.
16. Tower Of Bones
Just a side note, different monster blocks on the field have different properties. Skeleton blocks are unaffected by gravity, and often wear armor. As you hit them by clearing adjacent blocks, their armor goes from metal, to leather, then to nothing. It takes three hits to kill a fully armored skeleton block. Bat blocks are affected by gravity (Ironic since they’re bats and should be able to fly) and take one hit to kill unless protected by fog. There are also breakable and unbreakable stone blocks.
Unbreakable stone located on the top part of the board will be your bane. They can block the mana projectiles that appear when color blocks break, preventing them from charging your heroes. At least they don’t stop blades.
17. Sniper’s Perch
On top of being a more puzzle-oriented mode, the Tower is also a hard check of your damage per turn. The only way to do damage is the use of skills and you have a limited number of turns to fulfill your mission objective. If your team is strong enough to kill the enemy easily, you won’t need a support to keep them alive. On the other hand, bringing a shield hero can be a liability since you want every mana charge to hit the enemy hard. If the fight lasts long enough that a support would be useful, you’re probably out of turns anyway.
Even offensive supports suffer here heavily because the blocks themselves do no damage, though you can use them to open a strike. In the Tower, bring all your best single target skill nukers. To this end, you can also bring mana potions if you’ve saved up a lot of them. Drinking a potion and using a skill does not use up a turn. If you’ve been playing a while and managed to stockpile a ton of them, mana potions are extremely useful here.
18. The Shop
The shop in this particular game seems tailored for free players compared to most games, so long as the player is sharp. Always remember to buy the 4 star Hero Shards everyday, since they only cost 12k gold for 10 pieces. You pretty much make twice that just for waiting 12 hours for the Idle Chest even early on.
As for what you can buy with gems, it would be a good idea to buy the 8 Epic summon scrolls since it beats the Gacha for gem/hero ratio. You could also go for the 500 gem Elemental Summon Scroll if your team lacks a specific color and you’re tired of the Epic summon gacha messing with you.
Last of all, you could go for the 5 star Hero Shards if you hate the gacha and prefer a long haul to a guaranteed powerful reward. If you DO go for the 5 star shard long haul, it is recommended you go after the 5 star Hero Shards once you have at least a solid 4 star set though, so you aren’t excessively troubled in the earlygame. Those shards are expensive at 200 gems per 5 pieces, with 60 needed for a hero.
19. Blades, Bombs, And Gumball Dispensers
Anything more than three of the same block makes something special after being cleared. 4 blocks gets you the humble bomb, which will clear 4 blocks next to it in a cross pattern. 5 blocks gets you a horizontal blade, which cuts through a horizontal line across the board. 6 blocks gets you a vertical blade, which cuts through a vertical line across the board.
7 blocks gets you a cross blade, which cuts through the board in a plus (+) pattern. When blades hit each other, they will reorient themselves to where they can cause the most damage, so don’t worry about placing a pair of horizontal blades side by side. One of them will turn vertical when hit.
The final block type is the color bomb (They look like gumball dispensers), for 8 blocks of the same color. This destroys every block on the board that matches its color. This is less useful as part of a combo, but very good for clearing either unwanted blocks (in case you are missing a color on your team), powering up a specific hero on your team, or more easily setting up combos.
20. Stormtrooper’s Precision
Sometimes, you may be better off missing an attack deliberately than hitting a target. If a projectile from cleared blocks doesn’t hit a target, it will return to any hero in your team of the same color, charging their mana twice as hard than it would if it had hit a target. And seeing as mana is distributed at max strength to everyone of the same color as opposed to being split apart, this could be a usable skill-spam tactic in low color teams. If all your heroes of a said color are dead though, make sure you hit the enemy, since the blocks still do damage but cannot charge a dead hero’s skills. Because, you know, they’re dead.
21. Mana Chugging Cheap Shots
Skills and items do not count as a move to the game. They do not affect the enemy’s attack countdowns. This makes mana potions rather powerful. Hoarding enough of them can let you basically throw out a free attack or two without worrying about enemy retaliation.
It might be a good idea to buy the 5k gold small mana potions once a day, hoard them, then use them once you run into massive trouble. This’ll take a lot of patience since you can only buy one potion a day, but again, patience is key in this game. You can move up to buying the better potions once your coin income becomes more reliable.
22. It’s Over…One Thousand?
A good way to gauge whether you have a chance of winning is to check if the enemy is at least 1000 power above you. You’d be surprised what good luck or a massive combo can do in this game, especially with a fully colored deck or a good tricolor choice. Past that though, it’s safe to assume you’re utterly boned unless the game starts coddling you with extremely lucky block compositions.
23. Slow And Steady Wins The Game
This is a game for those who are patient. You need to keep calm and take stock of your moves in every fight. Know where the blocks will fall after you remove some, know which targets to prioritize, and if all else fails, wait for a lucky set of blocks at the start of a match after a battle goes wrong. This goes double for the grind itself: This is a generous game, and rewards will come to you not by trying to rush, but by being consistent.
Grind every mission and event you can, do your dailies, inch forward through the Tower, remember to buy stuff from the Shop as if they were part of your daily quests. Even if you start buying gems with real money, patience can still save you a lot.
The best deals for summons is the Shop’s Epic Summon Scroll 8-pack or 5 Star Hero Shards you can buy once a day, not the 10-roll located directly in the summon gacha. In which case, that buttload of gems you paid for will do you better spent once or twice a day than immediately, in the long term.
This concludes our Fable Wars beginner’s guide. While you go out and fight in this twisted tale, don’t hesitate to add some tips of your own in the comment section below!
r2
Monday 3rd of May 2021
thanks, super helpful