Review of The Witches

The Witches is a new family Discworld board game by Martin Wallace, produced by Mayfair Games.

Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 90 minutes

Summary of the Components

The Witches contains: rules; game board; witches dice; witches pieces; player displays; lots of cardboard tiles; and lots of cardstock cards.

Quality. Everything is very well produced. The tiles and boards are all thick, the cards are medium-weight, and everything is linen-textured. 5 out of 5.

Beauty. The tiles and cards all have nice graphic design, and there’s lots of great Discworld art scattered across everything. The board, which is a big map of Lancre, is particularly attractive. 5 out of 5.

Usability. The good usability elements of the game start off with the player boards, which helpfully remind you of the bonuses you get from solving problems. The majority of the game consists of solving those problems, and the values of those problems (and the victory points they will earn) are thus clearly marked on the problem tiles.

Unfortunately, those tiles neglect to mention the consequences of failure for the hard problems, and thus you have to remember them and/or look them up every time you encounter a hard problem. A simple icon would have resolved the problem. The game board also has some readability problems, as paths can disappear into the attractive background. Overall, there’s nothing that makes the game grossly difficult to play, but there are a few things that make the play of the game harder than it should have been. 3 out of 5.

Theming. The theming of the game is beautiful, beautiful, authentic Discworld. The tiles and cards are filled with characters and objects that you’ll probably recognize if you’re a fan. Even a lot of the actions feel very authentic to the setting — such as witches wandering around solving problems … or having tea. Discworld fans will love this release! 5 out of 5.

The Witches gets top ratings for quality, beauty, and theming. Despite some usability issues, this is still a top-rate production that earns a “5” out of “5” for Style.

Summary of the Gameplay

The Witches is an adventure game, where the object is to solve the most and hardest problems plaguing the country of Lancre before the end of the game.

Setup: Each player is given a witch trainee who has a minor special power. They choose somewhere to start on the board to place their witch. Each player also gets a hand of three cards. A number of starting problems are placed on the board: easy problems face-up and hard problems face-down. Finally, a number of problem tiles are laid out — to form a game-end timer and a place to draw tiles from; these are a mix of easy and hard problems.

The Cards. Cards form the players’ main resource in the game. Each one has a special power, which can be used appropriately, but cards also have broomstick, headology, and magic icons, which allow them to be used for bonuses at certain points in the game instead of being used for their special powers. Some cards are also labeled “Power of Three”.

Order of Play: On his turn, a player takes the following actions.

1. Place a problem
2. Move & Act
3. Move & Act (yes, a second time)
4. Draw Cards

Place a Problem. The player takes the top problem from the tile stack and places it in a place determined by the draw of a card. However, it can’t go in a place that has a witch or another problem.

• If There’s a Witch. Another card is drawn.
• If There’s a Problem. A crisis counter is placed on the location if there isn’t already one there. This is bad, because crisis counters can end the game with everyone losing! In addition, a crisis makes the problem under it a little harder to solve. Then, another card is drawn.

(This can continue for a while before a space is found for the new problem if the board is particularly crowded with witches and problems.)

Move. A witch can move up to two spaces on the board, but must stop for other witches or for problems. Alternatively, the witch can play a broomstick card to go anywhere.

Act. If the player lands on a space with another witch, they have tea and both lose some cackle counters (more on those in a minute, but they’re bad).

If the player lands on a space with a problem, they try to solve the problem. This is the heart of the game. The (slightly complex) procedure is as follows:

1. Roll 2 dice, taking cackle counters for any “cackles” rolled.
2. Decide whether to stay and solve the problem or flee — the latter if you rolled poorly.
3. If you decide to stay, play cards for their icons: headology gives 1 to solving the problem, while magic gives 2, but also a cackle counter.
4. Roll 2 more dice, taking cackle counters as usual.
5. Play any more cards for their special power only (which can include bonuses to problem solving).
6. Add up all 4 dice, the bonuses for the card icons, and any bonuses for card special powers. If the total is at least equal to the problem value (or that 2 if there’s a crisis marker), the witch wins, taking the problem for VPs at the end of the game. Else, the witch flees and takes a cackle counter.

There’s one alternate way to resolve a problem: at any time the player can play three different cards which all say “The Power of Three” to automatically solve it.

Draw Cards. At the end of their turn, a witch draws back up to a full hand of cards.

The Benefits of Solving Problems: Other than that warm feeling in your gut, solved problems also yield victory points: the harder the problem, the more the points. In addition, every two easy problems solved increases the witch’s hand size, and every two hard problems solved gives them a 1 bonus to solving problem. These are permanent gains to the character.

The Dangers of Cackles: There is a limited supply of cackles. If you ever need to take a cackle and there aren’t any, then you instead must take them from the player with the most … unless you’re the player with most, then you must instead take a Black Aliss tile, which is worth -1 VP.

Losing the Game: The players can lose the game in one of two ways: if three elves (which are hard problems) are turned face-up (because people investigated them, but didn’t solve the problem); or if all of the crisis tiles end up on the board and you need more. In either case, everyone loses.

Winning the Game: Otherwise, the game goes until the players go through the drawn set of problem tiles. Then the player that has the most points of problems solved (minus Black Alisses) wins the game.

Relationships to Other Games

The Witches is what I call a survival-focused cooperative game — or else a semi-cooperative game if you prefer. Though the game has a competitive core, the players must work together to a certain extent in order to win. Bruno Faidutti’s Terra and Avalon Hill’s The Republic of Rome are classics of the genre.

The Witches is also Martin Wallace’s second Discworld board game. His previous release was Discworld: Ankh-Morpork, which is a bit more of a eurogame (while this is a bit more of an adventure game) and which was a slightly more complex and serious game.

The Game Design

The Witches is a fairly simple adventure game, with its singular focus on solving problems. With that said, several different subsystems add interesting depth to the game.

To start with, it’s a game of card management. You have to decide which cards to quickly push through (to ensure that you solve the hardest problems that you can on every turn) and which ones to collect (to solve a harder problem on a future turn). The fact that you can collect “power of three” cards adds a particularly interesting bit of set-collection to the game — especially because they’re rare, which means that multiple players collecting the sets can spoil doing so for everyone!

I also like the fact that there’s some opportunity for character growth as you solve problems. This makes the decision between solving easy and hard problems even more interesting, because you have to look at what they’ll give your character for the future.

The cackles add another interesting bit of tension, because they’re a negative resource that you have to think about, but which you can maintain at high levels if you’re careful. I think we may have overthought them in our game, and that the best solution to cackles is just to ensure that you never take cackles when you’re in the lead; otherwise it’s fine to be at high levels.

Finally, the survival element of the game is theoretically interesting, because it gives you something that you have to pay attention to beyond your own points. Mind you, I say “theoretically” because the survival-focused elements aren’t tight enough in The Witches: neither the crises nor the elves are likely to be a huge danger unless players are purposefully playing to set them off. This can be adjusted, using a game variant that makes it harder; I don’t know exactly how that’ll affect the game, but I hope it’ll make it tougher without making it too easy to randomly lose.

The system for solving problems itself nicely combines some risk management with just a little ability to see ahead, thanks to the way that you roll your dice in two chunks. However, it’s all of these other elements that really raise The Witches up from being an average game to being a good one.

With that said, the overall simplicity of The Witches suggests that it’s primarily intended for families and casual gamers. If you’re in that demographic, then my Substance rating of “4” out of “5” is for you.

Conclusion

If you’re a Discworld fan, you should pick The Witches up; you’ll love the theming. For everyone else, The Witches is a good but relatively simple game: it’ll appeal to families and casual gamers, but more serious players will need to decide whether they want a light-ish game in their collection.