Witchdom
- Board's Eye View
- Apr 24
- 2 min read
If you're up for a spell of magic, this light card drafting game from Albi could be just the trick. Designed by Michal Peichl, it's a brisk game for 2-5 players, and with a solitaire mode too, where players are recruiting witches, collecting ingredients, completing potion recipes and trying to satisfy the randomised additional scoring objectives.
There's a slim board that's divided into three areas. Each area has three resource tokens (ingredients) on it, drawn at random from a bag. To the left of each of the three areas there'll be a potion card, and this will show the resources needed to brew it. To the right, there'll be a witch card.
On your turn, you play a witch card from your hand and that will show the areas from where you can take cards and/or resources. If you play a witch card that, for example, lets you take two items from the mountain area, you can take any two items from among the cards in that row and the resource tokens in that area. When you draft a potion card, you can choose to flip it to its reverse side so that it becomes a tool. Many of the potions, particularly those that score the most points, require a specific tool as well as the indicated combination of resource tokens. After you've drafted the cards and/or resources for your witch card, you can brew one of the potions you've previously drafted by paying over the indicated ingredients, but only if the colour of your active witch card matches the colour of the potion. You can expect to recycle and re-use your witch cards on subsequent turns but when you use a witch to brew a potion, that card gets taken out of play so will no longer be available to you - tho' it'll be in your scoring pile for end-of-game scoring.
That's pretty much Witchdom in a nutshell. It's easy enough for children to grok, and any Harry Potter fan will instantly warm to this game's theme. The game plays briskly: most of our plays at Board's Eye View run to around 30 minutes. We've especially enjoyed Witchdom as a light two-player game. It's not a game of deep strategy but there are meaningful choices to be made over when to take witches, potions, tools or ingredients, and when best to use a witch to brew a potion. The witch cards all have animal familiars on their reverse, so once you're familar with the game you can add the familiars to the play... In this mode, when you draft a witch card you have the additional option of flipping it to its animal side. As a familiar, you won't be able to use the card for its witch drafting or brewing but there's the potential to earn big points by collecting a set of different animal familiars.
As we've come to expect from Albi, the production quality of Witchdom is high. The ingredient resource tokens are screenprinted wooden discs - so much more satisfying than cardboard chits - and the game benefits from charming illustrations from Veronika Vondrová.
