Fog of Love - Board Game Review

Fog of Love – Board Game Overview

Designer: Jacob Jaskov
Publisher: Hush Hush Projects
Players: 2
Playtime: 60–120 minutes
Mechanics: Storytelling, role-playing, hand management, variable player powers, cooperative and competitive play

Setting the Stage: What Is Fog of Love?

Fog of Love is probably one of the stranger games on our board game shelf, and I mean that in a mostly positive way. Instead of competing to build the best city, collect the most points or destroy whatever monster happens to be threatening the kingdom, you create two characters who are about to enter a relationship and then see what happens to them.

You each build a character with their own personality, traits and expectations. From there, the game takes you through different scenes in their relationship. Some are romantic, some are awkward, and some make you wonder why these two people thought dating was a good idea in the first place. The interesting part is that you are not simply trying to make the relationship succeed. Your character has their own goals and desires, and sometimes the choice that is best for them is not necessarily the choice that keeps the relationship healthy. Apparently, fictional relationships can be just as complicated as real ones. Who knew.

That idea is what initially made Fog of Love so appealing to us. It is a board game built around interaction rather than quietly doing your own thing while occasionally blocking your opponent from taking the space you wanted. You have to pay attention to each other's choices, react to what happens and, at least to some extent, get into the mindset of the person you are playing.

When it works, that can be genuinely fun. You start making decisions that you personally would never make because, unfortunately, your character has terrible priorities. You find yourself defending choices that make absolutely no sense outside the context of the game. And sometimes the relationship you are creating slowly turns into a complete mess, which is honestly where some of our favourite moments came from.

At the same time, Fog of Love is very much a game that depends on your mood. It asks a little more from you than simply learning the rules and playing your cards. Both players need to be willing to engage with the characters and the situations the game throws at you. If you are both in the mood for that, it can be a really fun experience. If one of you just wants to play a straightforward board game after a long day, there is a good chance Fog of Love will stay on the shelf.

Why Fog of Love Feels Different as a Sapphic Couple

One of the things we appreciated about Fog of Love is that the relationship you create is actually yours to decide. When setting up the game, you can choose the gender of your characters, which means playing as two women is part of the normal experience rather than something you have to awkwardly work around.

For us, that makes a bigger difference than it might in a game where the theme is just decoration. Romance is the entire point of Fog of Love. You are making decisions about what your characters want from each other, what they are willing to compromise on and, occasionally, whether one of them is being such an absolute nightmare that the other should probably just go home.

Being able to start with two women without having to mentally rewrite the relationship made the game feel much more natural to us. We could create our characters, give them personalities and questionable priorities, and then get on with the important business of making increasingly dubious decisions on their behalf.

What I particularly like is that a sapphic relationship is not treated as some special version of the game. The rules do not change, there is no separate scenario you need to unlock and the relationship itself is not presented as unusual. You are simply creating two characters and seeing what happens when you put them in a relationship together.

That said, I would not go as far as calling Fog of Love perfect queer representation. The game is not specifically about sapphic relationships or queer experiences, and choosing two women does not suddenly turn the story into a deeply queer narrative. The scenarios are deliberately broad and designed to work with different kinds of couples. The presentation of the game also still has some fairly traditional gendered elements, so it is not as though every aspect of its design feels completely modern.

Still, as two women playing a game that revolves entirely around romance, we genuinely appreciated not having to do that little bit of mental editing before we could properly get into the story. We could sit down, create two fictional women with wildly different personalities and watch them try to build a relationship together.

Whether that relationship actually survived our decisions was, of course, another matter entirely.

Love Is Complicated, and So Is the Gameplay

This is probably where Fog of Love lost us a little. The storytelling concept is genuinely clever, and there is more going on mechanically than it might initially seem. Throughout the game, you are managing your character's satisfaction, shaping their personality through the choices you make and trying to work towards one of several possible destinies. Those destinies can pull the two players in very different directions, which means that you are not always trying to make the relationship work. Sometimes what is best for your character is also exactly what will make things considerably worse for everyone else involved.

On paper, I really like that idea. The problem for us is that the mechanics themselves never became particularly exciting. We understood what they were doing, and they certainly give your decisions some weight, but we were rarely sitting there because we were eager to figure out the smartest possible move. Most of the time, the interesting part was the situation around the decision rather than the decision itself. What would this particular character do? Would she compromise? Would she double down on something completely ridiculous? And would her fictional girlfriend finally realise that dating her was perhaps not the wisest choice?

When the scenes and characters click, Fog of Love can be genuinely funny. You start with two fairly innocent fictional people and somehow, an hour later, you are trying to explain why one of them has made yet another terrible life choice that somehow feels completely in character. Those are the moments where the game feels unlike anything else on our shelf. The combination of hidden goals and role-playing can create a nice amount of tension too, because you are never entirely sure what the other player is working towards or how far they are willing to go to get there.

The problem is that we did not have that experience every time. Some scenes landed much better than others, and occasionally we found ourselves moving through the game without becoming particularly invested in what was happening. Because the mechanics are so closely tied to the story, there is not a huge strategic hook left to fall back on when the narrative itself is not grabbing you. If the characters are not interesting to you or the scenes are falling a bit flat, the game can start to feel longer than it needs to.

That inconsistency is probably the biggest reason Fog of Love is not one of our automatic choices for a two-player game night. We enjoy it, but we have to be in the mood for exactly what it offers. We need to feel like role-playing a little, making decisions based on fictional personalities and being willing to go along with whatever strange relationship drama the cards decide to throw at us.

If we just want to sit down and play something smooth and immediately engaging, there are other games we are much more likely to pick. But when we are in the mood to create a messy little relationship between two fictional women and see whether they end up happily in love or completely ruining each other's lives, Fog of Love still offers an experience that very few other board games really manage to replicate.

Final Thoughts: Is Fog of Love Worth Playing?

Despite being fairly critical of parts of Fog of Love, I do genuinely like it, and I am glad we have it on our shelf. It is not a game that has completely won us over, but I also think it is doing something that very few board games even attempt. The combination of role-playing, hidden personal goals and relationship storytelling gives it a very specific kind of experience, and when everything comes together, it can be genuinely entertaining.

For us, the queer inclusiveness is a big part of why the game works as well as it does. Playing two women never felt like we were creating some alternative version of Fog of Love. The rules and character setup allow players to choose the gender identity that fits their character, and gender itself has very little mechanical impact on the game. That meant we could create our characters and get straight into deciding whether they were going to fall in love or slowly become each other's worst decision of the year.

That might not sound particularly revolutionary, but in a game where the entire theme revolves around a romantic relationship, it makes a real difference. We were not sitting there mentally adjusting the story to fit us. The relationship simply started with two women because that was the story we wanted to play, and from that point on, the game treated it exactly like any other relationship.

I also think Fog of Love is at its strongest when you stop trying to play it like a traditional strategy game. The game gives you goals and mechanics to work with, but some of our best moments came from following the personality we had created rather than chasing the most efficient outcome. There is something particularly entertaining about watching your partner make a choice that seems completely ridiculous to you, only for her to explain why it makes perfect sense for the fictional woman she has spent the last hour turning into an absolute menace.

That said, those moments do not happen automatically. Fog of Love asks quite a lot from the players in that sense. You both have to be willing to engage with the characters, react to the situations and put some personality into the decisions you make. If you are both doing that, the game can feel funny, personal and unlike most other two-player games. If you are not, the mechanics alone probably will not carry the experience.

That is ultimately why we land at a 7.5 out of 10. We like Fog of Love and would absolutely recommend it to sapphic couples who enjoy storytelling and role-playing, particularly because it allows you to create a romantic relationship without having to adapt the game around yourselves. But it is not one of those games we automatically suggest when we want to play something together. The stories can be uneven, the gameplay is not especially deep on its own, and the whole experience depends quite heavily on being in the right mood.

When that mood does hit, though, we are very happy to have it. There is something undeniably fun about sitting down together, creating two fictional women with incompatible personalities and questionable priorities, and then spending the next hour trying to determine whether they are soulmates or whether somebody should have ended the relationship three scenes ago.

Final Scores

Accessibility and rulebook: 7.5/10
Theme and storytelling: 8.5/10
Queer representation: 9/10
Replayability: 6.5/10
Component quality: 8/10

7.5 out of 10

💕 Final rating: Fog of Love is a quirky and refreshingly inclusive two-player game that lets you create your own messy love story without forcing sapphic players to adapt the experience to fit them. The storytelling can be genuinely funny and memorable, but the gameplay is light and heavily dependent on being in the right mood. We do not reach for it every date night, but when we feel like causing emotional chaos for two fictional women, it is definitely the game for the job.

Connect

Questions, thoughts, or book suggestions? Reach out!

Privacy Policy |

Cookie Policy |

Disclaimer

© 2026 ChaoticSapphics. All content unless otherwise stated is owned by Chaotic Sapphics. All rights reserved.