Game Preview/Review: Witchcraft

By W. Eric Martin
October 10, 2008

Publisher: Portal Publishing
Designers: Michal Oracz & Ignacy Trzewiczek
Players: 2
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 40 minutes
Release Date: Spiel 08
Languages: Polish, English & German
Price: €22
Links:

Are you ready for Neuroshima Hex: The Gathering? In Witchcraft, NH designer Michal Oracz, together with Portal Publishing’s Ignacy Trzewiczek, gives two players their own army of wizards, each of which can attack in a certain direction (or directions) and with a certain style of attack.

The 4x6 gameboard has four altars placed on it – altars which each have a special ability – then players take turns placing eight wizards on the board, orienting them as desired to threaten an opponent’s pieces. Players then take turns making one move from three possibilities:

• Attacking an enemy wizard
• Casting a spell on an altar
• Using one of your special tiles on the gameboard

Hit an enemy wizard, and you remove it from the board, flip it to reveal your color (showing that the wizard is now working for the side of good, i.e., for you), then place it on one of your existing tokens or stacks. After casting a spell, a wizard is marked with an exhaustion token that prevents it from attacking again, but overlaying that tile with a captured wizard effectively gives you a refreshed wizard ready to strike again.

Hit an altar with your spell, and you can bring new pieces onto an expanded gameboard, remove exhaustion tokens, set up shields, or move and rotate your wizards, who normally stand still as stone. Altars can be destroyed by the barbarian or activated in pairs by the priest. Two other special characters allow you to swap stacks of tiles under your control or scatter the tiles of a stack onto other tiles that you control. You receive one of these special characters each game, in addition to a prophet that provides one-time exhaustion relief and movement.

Your goal is straight out of Kris Burm’s TZAAR: Capture and convert all of the enemy wizards, or prevent the opponent from taking an action on his turn, either by protecting your troops with shields or moving them out of harm’s way. In either case, you’ll win the game.

Game review, by W. Eric Martin

Version played: Preproduction copy
Times played: Six

Witchcraft repeats Oracz’s magic trick – first seen in Neuroshima Hex – of creating a thematic, (near-)perfect information game that melts brains while giving you a world that can be expanded in any number of directions once players get the hang of wizard-jockeying.

I’ll admit that my first play of the game was a mess – not so much because I didn’t understand the rules as that I had no idea what to do. Until you place the tiles on the board for that first game and start seeing the results of your actions, it’s hard to imagine how everything fits together.

Think of that first game of Chess with its half dozen pieces, each with a different movement ability, and the possible attacks on the board that open and close based on the movement of a single piece. The decision tree in Witchcraft layers the possible moves you can make on the first turn – up to eight, although it’s unlikely that all of your pieces will have a target – with the multitude of potential outcomes for those moves: adding a shield in any of eight directions on up to seven wizards and one special character, shooting the altar that lets you rotate and move a piece (with seven wizards to turn, eight directions to consider and four empty spaces to move to), eliminating an enemy and deciding where and in which direction to place it on a piece of your own, and so on. I’ll leave the calculations to someone else, but suffice to say that you have a lot to consider.

Becoming a Mage

As tiles are removed from the board – that is, stacked on top of other tiles – your choices start becoming easier, but that’s not always a good thing since that situation might result from you running out of wizards to command, either through exhaustion or defection. In this respect, the game lives up to the Chess comparison because an early mistake can lead to constant backpedaling as you try to escape being run over. One of my games ended after only three or four turns, for example, because my opponent failed to see that I could escape from being threatened while also removing his remaining threats, leaving him no options despite having multiple tiles on the board. These moves and situations are more obvious to me and my opponent now that we’ve played a few times, and I can more easily spot situations in which I can simultaneously remove a threat, revive a wizard (by playing atop the piece), protect it from being attacked, and threaten someone else. I wouldn’t say that I’m a great player, mind you, but those few games undoubtedly give me an edge against a first-timer.

Additional tiles can come onto the board, and that’s one way to turn the tide is a losing battle. Hit the right altar, and you add one of three pairs of extra gameboard pieces (composed of 1-3 squares). The pieces have to be placed around the gameboard in a symmetrical fashion, and after doing so your opponent adds one of his reserve pieces – you start with three – to one new section of the board, then you add a piece of your own to the other section.

One of those reserve pieces has the ability to target anything in its line of sight, instead of just the first enemy that it sees, and that ability can let you target a juicy stack of enemy wizards that would be otherwise inaccessible – assuming they’re not moved out of the way or shielded in the intervening turn. Another piece has an attack that can blast through shields; you start with one of those “Thunder"-powered wizards, but the tile is targeted early due to its strength, and losing it can mean a quick dwindling of targets as the enemy adds a few shields in just the right locations.

Each player also starts the game with a randomly drawn power token that mimics one of the four altars, and you learn to keep that ability in mind while placing forces at the start of the game. Being able to hit all of the altars is good, but doing so means you’re not targetting the opponent, so the power token – which can be played once in addition to your normal move – lets you spread the threats around more equitably. These tokens are face-down at the start of the game and are the only piece of hidden information. (Under the tournament rules, you don’t use power tokens in order to remove the random element, but I’ve inadvertently created another variant by mistakenly playing all of my games with the power tokens face-up. It works for me!)

Magic Is Hard

Aside from the steep learning curve, Witchcraft is complicated by timing issues of what happens when that aren’t spelled out in enough detail in the rules, with the main complications being a wizard who can shoot in two directions simultaneously, the timing of exhaustion token placement, and a note that the altar that removes exhaustion tokens can’t remove one from the wizard who cast a spell at it. Well, the details are in the rules, but scattered across multiple pages. Here’s a breakdown of the spell timing, as clarified by co-designer Trzewiczek:

1. Cast the spell and identify the target or targets.
2. If you hit an altar (or two), carry out the effect(s) of the altar in an order of your choice.
3. Place an exhaustion token on the wizard that cast the spell.
4. If you hit an enemy wizard (or two), remove them from the board.
5. Place any smited wizards back on the board on top of your tiles.
6. Prepare for a backlash.

The final issue I have with Witchcraft isn’t caused by the game so much as the players of it. If an opponent likes to think through every possible move, you could be sitting with nothing to do for a long time as he calculates and mentally repositions this and that tile or stack.

Oddly, the rules mention several times that you can’t change the orientation of tiles underneath other tiles (barring use of the prophet), yet nothing in the game allows you to remove only the top tile of a stack and expose the one underneath. As such, don’t be surprised if more tiles, tokens, spells and altars come into existence in the future.

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Comments:

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Hmm...link to rules are not working… :( Posted by Mario Steigerwald on Oct 10, 2008 at 04:26 AM | #

The rulebook links are now fixed. Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Oct 10, 2008 at 10:09 AM | #

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