Abracadabra is a family-oriented set-collection game in daVinci Game's new "allegro" series.
Players: 2-6
Playing Time: 20-40 minutes
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)
daVinci Games are produced & distributed in the United States by Mayfair Games.
The Components
Abracadabra comes in a box with:
- 40 playing cards
- 3 tower cards
- 6 summary cards
- 58 magic objects
- 1 rulesheet
Fullsize Cards: The playing cards, tower cards, and summary cards are all full-sized cards, printed full-color on high-quality, linen-textured cardstock with rounded-corners. They all have attractive artwork and are nice to look at.
The playing deck includes: 30 enchanters, 6 trick cards, and 4 elementals. This makes up the deck that is used to play the game. Each enchanter is clearly marked with a specific color of border (earth brown, water blue, fire yellow, or air white), a specific color or robe (yellow, gray, red, or white), and a specific aspect of enchanter (old Gandalfesque wizard, young Potteresque mage, or happy fairielike witch). The distinctions are only somewhat easy to make out; every player had some problem figuring out sets during play (more on that later). The trick (action) cards each have a special effect. Unfortunately, their names are in Latin, and the only further explanation is an icon; the icons tended to be OK, not great. (Internationalization strikes again, though daVinci typically does an average job dealing with it.) Lastly there are the four elementals, which give bonus points at scoring (unfortunately, that's not marked on the cards).
The full-size cards also include 3 towers which solely mark locations on the table, and 6 summaries, which explain the overly complex & convuluted method for scoring sets. I don't think anyone actually used them because trying to look at the listing of 7 different sets was headache inducing (more on that later, again).
Halfsize Cards: The remaining cards were all half-size, but again printed full-color on high-quality linen-textured cardstock with rounded corners. 49 of them were "magic object" cards, 7 for each of the7 types of sets. Each one showed the attributes necessary to make that type of set on one side and a (random) number of victory points on the other. The icons selected to show how the sets worked weren't entirely intuitive, but most players had them figured out by the end of the game. The remaining 9 half-size cards were all bonus victory point cards awarded during the game, eight "+1"s and one "+5".
Rulesheet: A high-quality full-color rule-sheet, printed with plenty of examples and illustrations. I'm always a bit intimidated by daVinci's rules because they always look long, all printed on a single rulesheet, but they usually read easily and quickly.
Box & Tray: Abracadabra comes in a slightly flimsy cardboard box with a very solid plastic tray which slides in. The tray is great because it separates the cards into two piles, which will stay separated, and is quite sturdy. The half-size cards don't really fit great in the tray, but it keeps them from going all over.
Overall, the production of this game is great, with high-quality cards and nice artwork. I do have some issues with how intuitive the iconography really is for figuring out sets, but that's really an issue with the game system, not the pieces; thus my only actual component-related complaint are those Latin action cards, which are at least OK. Thus I've let Abracadabra eke in a "5" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Abracadabra is to organize high-quality convocations of enchaters (e.g., collect sets) in order to earn mighty magical artifacts (e.g., victory points) and also gain power over the elements (e.g., collect specific cards).
Setup: The magic objects are organized into 7 piles of 7 (labelled "A" to "G"), each shuffled, and placed in the middle of the table. The "new gathering" (+1) and "elemental master" (+5) victory points are placed nearby. The three towers are also placed nearby.
The playing card deck is shuffled, then four are drawn from it. Three of these cards are placed face-down and one face-up.
The Cards. The cards are divided into four elements: earth, water, fire, and air. There are 10 cards in each element. The earth, water, and fire elements each include 9 enchanters (with differing aspects and schools) and 1 elemental. The air element includes 3 enchanters (who are wild cards, 1 in each aspect), 6 tricks (5 of which are action cards, 1 of which is a bad card that takes effect immediately), and 1 element.
The element of each card is also shown on the back which means that even though you'll be drawing face-down cards some of the time, you still have some indication of what they are.
Order of Play: Each turn a player does the following:
- Draw 2 Cards
- Organize a Gathering; or Play a Trick (optional)
- Discard Cards
- Replace Cards Drawn
Draw 2 Cards: The player takes 2 cards from the 4 cards on the table (3 face-down, 1 face-up).
Organize a Gathering: If a player wishes, he may organize a gathering. This means playing a set of 3 enchanter cards which are either all alike or all different in each of the three characteristics (aspect, school, element). So, for example, a player could play a set of earth elementalists, one of each aspect (witch, young wizard, old wizard), and all from the silver school of magic; or a player could play an earth, fire, and wizard elementalist, who are all old wizards, but one from each school of magic. Etc. The air wizards are "wild" cards who have a set aspect but can fill in for any school or element.
There's actually an alternative way to form a gathering too: you can grab one of the three enchanter from the previous gathering (anyone but the air wizards), and match that enchanter with two from your hand.
Each of the 7 piles of magic objects on the table lists a specific set of enchanter gathering characteristics. For example the "A" pile is: different aspects, identical schools, identical elements; while the "G" pile is: different aspects, different schools, different elements. All of the possibilities are included, and generally as you climb through the letters you move to more of the characteristics being different and less the same (though it's not an entirely clean progression). When you play a set of enchanter cards you then take a magic object card from the appropriate pile. It either lists a number of victory points or else has a special "alchemist stone" (one of several, unecessary rule complications; we'll get to it). In addition to your artifact card you also get a special +1 "new gathering" card if all 3 of the enchanters came from your hand.
Here's the catch: the lower letters are worth fewer victory points, and the higher ones are worth more. However, trying to keep track of 2 variations of 3 characteristics is quite difficult, thus it takes an immense amount of concentration to figure out which characteristics you should be collecting for maximum benefit and which you shouldn't--a level of concentration which really meshes badly with the rest of the game.
Here's another complication: if you completed an "A" gathering you're going to get an extra turn after the current one is done.
Play a Trick: Alternatively, you can play a trick from your hand, if you have one. There are 5 total: 1 that gets you the points from the previous gathering; 1 that gets you the points from the next gathering; 1 that lets you steal a card; 1 that lets you trade a card; and 1 that forces other players to discard enchanters.
(There's also an uber-bad Trick card called "Periculum" which forces you to discard your whole hand; it's clearly intended to as a balance to scare people from taking face down air cards. It actually has to be played immediately, unlike all the other trick cards, and very annoyingly says so nowhere on the card.)
Discard a Card: If you have more than 5 cards, you must discard.
Replace Cards Drawn: Then you replace the cards you drew from the table, placing them face-up or face-down as appropriate.
Winning the Game: A player wins if they have 15 points in artifacts and/or "new gathering" cards.
But wait, there's a special rule: if the player has elementals in his hand they're worth 1 point each. And, if he has at least 3 he gets an elemental master card worth an additional 5.
But wait, there's a special rule: a player also can win if he has two alchemists' stones (shown on the back of some magic object cards) and a third magic object, which he can turn into a relic.
Relationships to Other Games
Abracadabra is a set collection game, meaning the main purpose is to acquire coherent sets of cards. It's the same category of games that includes Rummy--and on the much simpler side items like Go Fish and Old Maid.
More specifically, Abracadabra is somewhat similar to the classic game Set which required you match up sets of cards that were either all the same or all different in certain characteristics.
Differentiating itself from other set collection games, Abracadabra is at the same time more random and more complex than many--a very bad combination as I discuss further below.
The Game Design
If you haven't figured it out already, I didn't like Abracadabra. Neither did any of our other players. It's got an overly complex gamng system that requires you to first of all memorize the ranking of 7 different set types and secondly to remember a lot of one-off rules (such as the bonus for an "A" set, the bonus for elementals, the alternative way to win, etc). Frankly I found the ranking of the 7 sets very hard to memorize, as they're not entirely coherent, and they were sufficiently complex that the little summary cards didn't help much either; the rest of the rules were memorizable, but scarcely worth the trouble.
The reason was that the game was very random. You could do some clever things to try and maximize your chance for a set, but there was so much randomness in what you drew and in the points that you got afterward, that it overrode the cleverness. The Trick cards were the worst of all as they could sometimes give you 4 or 5 points for free.
There were some clever ideas in the game. I liked the different suits having different backs, for example, which I've only seen in one other game, Gargon; likewise, I liked the method to make a set with just two cards rather than three. However, these weren't enough to make this a good game.
I will offer one caveat. I've read that kids are better at matching up the types of sets found in Set, and thus this game as well. Thus, they might find this game playable where I didn't. I can't offer a true assessment of that factor, however.
Thus, going just on my own intuition I have to call this a bad game. The set matching was difficult, the ranking of sets was unmemorizable, and the gameplay was overly complex and random. I give it a "2" out of "5" on Substance, but only because I think that technically it's playable; I almost gave it a "1".
Conclusion
A new set-collection game with some interesting mechanics that largely fails. It's too random, too complex, and too baroque.
Review Summary