Witchcraft!

Witchcraft! is a fast-playing, card-driven solitaire game where you lead a coven of witches in a fantasy world where magic is real–and so are the monsters. 

Building on the hidden / revealed mechanism of Resist! you will decide when to use magic to defeat the challenges you face–revealing yourself to your fellow villagers and being imprisoned for witchcraft. As you complete missions and defeat enemies you will try to prove to the villagers that magic is not evil, and convince a jury that you are protecting the village.

Three jurors will decide your fate and their conviction is strong. Can you persuade them? Or will evil overcome you and the village? – 25th Century Games

Witchcraft! came into my household 8 months ago, as part of a trio of board games my dear friend Dove gifted me over the holidays. Excitedly, I opened the box, saw all the card decks and rules and… immediately closed the box. For eight months. 

One would think, based on how long this game sat on my shelf as I deliberated when I wanted to delve back into the rules and setup, that this game is incredibly complex. It’s not! It really, really isn’t. Yes, it is going to require a decent amount of table space – 3/4 of my coffee table were covered, and it was pretty cramped. Yes, setup is going to take you a few minutes each time because you aren’t using all the cards in each game, and need to assemble your in-game decks each time you play. And yes, as with any game, the first time you play you’ll realize you were doing something wrong halfway through and then make the appropriate adjustment – but it’s not complicated! After one round of the gameplay loop, I understood the order and then it was just a matter of puzzling out the various Challenges and Witch abilities.

Now, there is a general way to play Witchcraft, but I wasn’t doing that – I was playing the first part of the Wildegrens adventure book included with the game. It features some distinct rules and deck composition for each game, which all come together to tell a larger story. It’s neat. I think this made setup more challenging for me as I was being introduced to variant rules when I didn’t know the regular ones, but also think that I had an easier game overall because of it.

Briefly, gameplay looks like this: you have Missions on the board you are trying to complete, each of which has a set number of Challenges revealed when you select a given mission for the round. You use your Witches abilities – Hidden or Revealed – to deal with these challenges, and, hopefully, complete the Mission. Oftentimes, your Witches abilities will not have enough Power for you to deal with all Challenges and complete the Mission, so you need to be strategic in choosing which is more important in a given round. You do not – unless otherwise stated – need to complete every Challenge to finish a Mission. However, many of the Challenges have effects which come into play if you fail to overcome them. This can look like a Witch being exiled, you adding a curse to the Coven deck (where you draw your hand from each round), or X number of Villagers being sacrificed. Meanwhile, if you successfully complete a Mission, you start to persuade the Juror associated with that Mission that maybe you aren’t all so bad – this is important, because in order to win the game (in regular gameplay), your persuasion score needs to be equal or greater than their Conviction by game’s end, when you go on Trial.

There’s some extra details in there I’m omitting – like how Familiars are Challenges that can be overcome but then provide you with a permanent boon – but I’m trying to keep it brief!

Each Round is made up of 6 actions, starting with the chance to play any Witch abilities you’d like. Some of them allow you, for example, to reveal a Challenge associated with any Mission of your choice – a great way to get some extra intel before moving into step 2 and choosing your Mission for the Round. Once you’ve chosen your Mission, you reveal all the Challenges associated with it, and then move to Step 3 which is using any remaining Witch abilities – you must play each Witch in your hand every round. Step 4 sees you trying to overcome Challenges, and resolving the effects of those cards as they take place. Next comes the Mission resolution where, hopefully, you’re successful in overcoming it! Any Challenge, or Mission, that isn’t overcome will have its failure effect triggered if applicable. Which then brings us to Step 6, where you’re setting everything up for the next Round!

If it sounds complicated, I promise it’s much more straightforward when everything is in front of you.

Now that I’ve hopefully done a sufficient job in outlining what’s going on in this game, let’s get to the important stuff: did I enjoy it?

In short: yeah, I did!

While intimidating at first, Witchcraft! isn’t nearly as complicated as I thought it was at first look. After the first Round of gameplay I had a solid grasp on how to play, and immediately started digging deeply into the Witch abilities to see how they could synergize with one another to keep our Coven going, and do our best to help Wildegren from the various threats facing it. The art, by Albert Monteys, is striking and evocative, assisting in bringing the feeling of this isolated village and its inhabitants to life. While I enjoyed the dozens of Character designs, and the variety in the Challenge cards, my favourite ones were the Mission cards – the environments in them are gorgeous. Truly my only wish was that the cards were larger so that the art could be appreciated in greater detail.

It also doesn’t take long to play. Sure, my first go was about 90 minutes but that was with me figuring out the rules for the first time while half-listening to an actual play in the background. That’s on me. Gameplay, usually, should be between 20-40 minutes a game and I can easily see that – once you get into the swing of things, Rounds go by very quickly and I do think setting up will consistently be the longest part. I like that it comes with an adventure book offering these alternate ways to play as you go through a storyline, and that you can completely ignore it if you want to – it offers an alternate way to play, but you can go ahead with the rules as presented in the rulebook, and still have an evolving, random game each time.

Also? It’s hard! I was putting serious thought into how best to navigate each Round so that my Coven would survive until the end of the game. There was a lot of me going, “I’m going to do X, wait, no but this Challenge is up which means this happens so… okay wait, I Have Y here which will synchronize nicely with Z, which means … okay, yeah, I’ll do that instead!” I was really surprised that I won my first game, and it felt quite satisfying. Given that there are several ways to lose and one way to win the first tale of Wildegren, it wasn’t my expected outcome!

I’d suggest it for the witchy, horror loving boardgame people in your life – it is a solo game, so has the sometimes very helpful feature of not needing other people around to play it. Especially after playing a few games, this is a fun, fast-faced, “oh I have an hour to kill? Okay, I’ll break out Witchcraft!”

You can find Witchcraft! for about 32$ CAD. For Canadians, I suggest here (free pickup in store, otherwise flat shipping rates), and you can find it from EU publisher Salt & Pepper games, and US publisher 25th Century Games.

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