In FYFE, the cover invites you to a tropical paradise, but the real adventure lies in digging in the sand and arranging your discoveries into clever scoring combinations. Each player receives a personal 5x5 grid, seven lucky charm tiles, and fifteen scoring boards. The game comes with 125 tokens, each displaying one of five colors, one of five symbols, and one of the numbers 1 to 5. The scoring boards detail the conditions you need to meet to score points, such as numerical sequences, tokens of the same color, different symbols, or specific color combinations.

To start, you draw two tokens from the bag, place one of them in an empty space on your grid, and choose a scoring board for the corresponding row, column, or diagonal. In subsequent turns, you draw one token, add it to your personal board, and choose one of the two available tokens to place on your grid. If the newly placed token is not covered by a scoring board, you must choose one of your unused boards and position it.

As soon as a line of five tokens is completed and the scoring board's conditions are met, you flip it to the points side. If you are the first to complete and score that board in the round, you earn a 3-point bonus. Completing multiple lines in a single turn yields larger bonuses, from 5 to 20 points. If a lucky charm token is drawn at the start of the round, all players can use one of their own charms, which allow them to swap tokens, use a wild card, or even replace an already fulfilled scoring board. Unused charms are worth points at the end. After 25 rounds, the player with the highest score combining boards, bonuses, and lucky charms wins.