Game Review: Wicked Witches Way

By W. Eric Martin
September 6, 2007

Publisher: Asmodée Editions / Pro Ludo
Designer: Serge Laget & Bruno Cathala
Players: 2-6
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Rules Language: English / French / German

There’s a good chance that you will despise Wicked Witches Way. And if you don’t—if, in fact, you excel at the game and deserve the title of WWWinner for your wonderfully witchy skills—then there’s a good chance that everyone else you play with will despise the game. And you.

Wicked Witches Way—published in French as Du Balai! and due out in October 2007 in German as Flinke Feger—falls into the category of speed reaction games. As with games like Set and Ricochet Robot, players of Wicked Witches Way need to examine the game elements quickly, recognize patterns, and react. Due to unknown quirks in the working of the human brain, some people will spot patterns as quickly as spinach in your girlfriend’s teeth while others will simply be dazzled by her smile and unable to focus on any possible flaws in her appearance.

The game puts players in the role of witches who are eager to show off their broom-handling skills. Naturally they decide to hold a flying race and see who will sweep her way across the finish line first. To move forward, you need to know the magic formulas in a huge spellbook, which in a dazzling display of packaging is the game box itself.

Two magic formulas—one orange, the other black—are created each round. A player rolls nine dice into one-half of the spellbook; three sides of the dice are orange, the other three black, and nine different symbols are distributed among the die faces. If a symbol appears in both black and orange, then it’s not part of a formula. (Matter, meet anti-matter. Zoop!) If a symbol appears in a color more than once, all but one of the symbols are ignored. Whatever orange symbols remain form the orange formula and the black symbols, the black formula. Spotting these formulas is tricky because (1) you can’t touch any of the dice and must sort and eliminate them mentally and (2) someone will likely close the spellbook before you’ve figured out a formula. You are permitted to curse at that player.

Once the spellbook is closed, each player uses a hand of symbol cards to “write down” one of the formulas. After everyone has done this, you open the spellbook, sort the dice, and see who’s flying and who’s falling. If you include symbols that aren’t in a formula or mix orange and black symbols, then you don’t move. If you match only orange or only black symbols, then you move ahead a number of spaces equal to the number of symbols you matched. If you play the entire orange formula, you move ahead two extra spaces; matching the black formula gives you a “black magic” card that has some special effect.

Clearly some players will romp at this kind of game while others will refuse to play. (One game that I started dissolved after two turns due to a player dropping out, while on two other occasions players have vetoed the game off the table.) The game’s designers, Serge Laget and Bruno Cathala, appear to have anticipated this reaction because the person (or persons) in the lead are handicapped with a curse that prevents them from scoring the bonus for a complete spell.

Despite the curse’s intention of preventing a runaway leader, in all the games that I’ve completed, a player has been in the lead for the entire race and won. (That player, incidentally, was me. I worked in a gamestore in the early 1990s for three years and demoed Set at least a dozen times a day. That pattern-recognition training has served me well in Wicked Witches Way.)

While the black magic cards can give players tricks that will hinder a leader or boost themselves, if the same quick processor closes the spellbook each round, his opponents are unlikely to score the black formulas they need to kneecap him—and he’ll average more points than them to stay in the lead.

With repeat playings, the slowpokes might be able to improve their ability to create formulas and give Speedy Gonzalez a better broomrace, but I haven’t encountered too many folks eager for a rematch. That’s a shame as the game’s look and packaging is charming—aside from a cover that might disturb people willing to read more into an image than is intended. The game looks like a spellbook, with a metal latch to keep the cover closed and a rounded spine to further the image. The game includes stickers that can be placed over the symbols on the dice; this seems like an odd production decision until you realize that the printing on some dice is too low contrast for everyone to make out the symbols. Then you think for another second and the decision is still odd since you think the publisher would find another method of printing the dice to make them easier to use.

The right audience for Wicked Witches Way is out there; the trick is finding them. Maybe I should have been hustling first-time players instead of crushing them in order to spur their interest in the game. Maybe your group will be better balanced than mine in terms of player skill. Maybe a group of kids would enjoy the game more than adults. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

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