Double Double, Toil and Trouble

Another new game to join my collection in the recent influx of board games was Witch's Brew, the fourth installment of the Alea "medium-box series." As I noted earlier this week, Race to the Galaxy has momentarily crowded almost everything else, but I have had the chance to try this a few times now and form an opinion.

This is a card game in which players are trying to collect gold nuggets and three different potion ingredients to be used in brewing the most valuable potions. Potions come in five stacks of cards, with increasing point value (and increasing difficulty to brew ) the further into the game you go.

You accomplish your goal using your own tiny "deck" of twelve cards depicting different roles. Each player has an identical deck of twelve, and in each round of play, everyone chooses any five cards they wish from their decks to form their hand. Play then proceeds in such a way where you are mosted advantaged to have chosen cards no one else chose. However, you can also do well by either being last in the play order to have picked a card chosen by multiple players, or by correctly determining whether any players still to act after you in the play order have the same role you're currently playing.

If I were to attempt to compare this game to something else I've played before, I'd have to say it has quite a few similarities in principles to Adel Verplichtet (aka Hoity Toity; aka By Hook or By Crook). Both games set the players against each other in unusual, more complicated versions of "Paper/Rock/Scissors," in which you achieve the greatest success trying to figure out what your opponents will do, and trying to figure out whether you should do something different when you think your opponent thinks he knows what you might do. ("Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.")

Similarly, it's not really all that much a game as an arena in which the players can spend a quick 30 minutes trying to get inside each others' heads. Oh, it is fun. And the fast pace certainly helps with that. But there's only just so much analysis of the moves of so many opponents you can do before chaos intrudes. In short, while every game does offer a few moments of strategic interest, it offers much more randomness than strategy.

It's a good "towards the end of the night" game to pull out when people are too exhausted to tackle something more sophisticated, but aren't yet ready to go home. And not bad, taken fully in that mindset. (Though I think I'd still prefer Adel Verplichtet to Witch's Brew, for a game of this nature.)

I'd rate it a B-. If you're collecting Alea games, you should get this one to keep your collection going. (It's not one of the bad ones I'd encourage you to skip.) Outside of that, it's a "maybe." One copy in a given gaming group is probably enough; I wouldn't think it a game you'd be itching to have a copy of your own.