Witches' Revel
- Board's Eye View
- 13 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Witches' Revel is a game of spellcasting combat between two warring witches - or, rather, witches who are friendly rivals. That makes it an appropriate choice for Halloween but, tho' it's a witch-themed duelling game, Aura Vulcano's game and its cute artwork are not going to trigger any nightmares.
It's an expandable card game, so you can add in extra card packs, but the core game comes with a pair of pre-constructed decks - making this a two-player combat card game that's playable straight out of the box. The players each have their own witch (Celosia or Nymphaea), each with their own unique power. You start off with a hand of three cards drawn from your individual deck and, on your turn, you draw a card and play a card, but if you choose to forego your card play you can draw an extra card.
Most of the cards in your deck represent spells, and these are played to any of five slots so that each spell is likely to face one from your opponent. When you play a card whose attack power is greater than that of any opposing spell, you are winning that slot, and a key win condition is for a player to be winning in all five slots. Some spells are purely defensive, so cannot win a slot, but you may be able to play defensive shield spells from your hand as an 'interrupt', and the shield spells can also be discarded after use to make room for more attack spells. Also some spells generate and others burn 'Passion'; another resource that can be used to great effect when properly managed.
There are tactics and a pleasing push-your-luck element over the decisions of when and where to play your attack cards; if you beat a card already in a slot, not only do you become the player winning in that slot but you 'overpower' your opponent's card and it gets discarded. You can also 'stitch' a spell card to one you've previously played; that increases its power but at the cost of 'Stamina' - a finite resource whose exhaustion triggers the end game. You get extra turns for each Stamina you have left after your opponent's Stamina is exhausted, and that can be the crucial element in seizing victory by securing a majority of slot wins...
We'd have ideally liked a playmat that set out the five battleground spell slots, and the game doesn't come with any discrete markers for recording Passion (we ended up utilising dice faces), but these are minor shortcomings in this quite literally charming easy-to-play card game.
