In both Witch's Brew and Broom Service, each player starts with an identical deck of role cards, each card allowing the player to take a particular action. From the full spectrum available, everyone selects just a few they hope to do during the upcoming round. Once everyone has chosen this hand, play begins with one player playing one of their role cards face up. Each role has two different actions, a "greater" version of the action, and a "lesser" version of the action -- and the player must choose one or the other when playing the card.
That specific choice is the heart of the game. Choose the lesser action, and you immediately get to do it. Choose the greater, and you must wait for play to pass around the whole table. If anyone behind you plays the same role card you choose, and chooses "greater," you get nothing. They take the greater action instead... unless someone else plays greater behind them. The game is a constant test of greed and guessing what your opponents picked for their role cards. Do you take the risk for a bigger payoff, or settle for less when maybe you could have had more?
Witch's Brew uses this system to fairly straightforward ends: actions either gather raw ingredients, or spend those ingredients to brew potions. Broom Service uses that system with a fantasy world map. Players create potions and then move around the board to deliver them for points. The game is actually a lot less like Witch's Brew than I expected; Broom Service is just taking that clever planning system and applying it to something new.
Indeed, the new board element makes the planning mechanic shine even better. It makes what every player is doing much more visual. The board is divided into regions of different terrain types, with towers awaiting deliveries in each region. Many of the action cards play to move players to an adjacent region of a particular terrain type, so looking at where everyone is at -- and guessing whether and where they're likely to move -- becomes a major part of the game. It's actually easier to analyze than the decisions of Witch's Brew, where a player can often get to roughly the same end in multiple ways. Being able to read your opponents better in Broom Service broadens the "mind game" aspect of the system: it sure seems like he'll choose this, but if he knows I know that, will he choose something different?
Broom Service adds a couple of extra wrinkles to keep you coming back. There's bad weather that must be dispelled before players can enter some regions of the board. You have to try for back to back actions in the right order (which isn't easy to pull off), or risk that you'll open up new territory that an opponent might move into first. There's a fixed number of rounds, and that time pressure also starts to weigh on players' decisions. You suspect an opponent wants to do this particular thing, and you know they've only got a little bit of time left to do it. Will they make their move this round or next? The board is also double-sided, with mini-expansions to the game that you can play on the flip side. We haven't yet played Broom Service nearly enough to be needing that extra strategy -- particularly when the core game plays so well on its own. But it's nice to know it's there.
Still, I do have a slight reservation about the game that has emerged as we've played it a few times. Each of our games so far has been won by the player who was leading in score after the end of the second round. Scores have often been close at least, yet it also seems like making different choices from the crowd early on can jump you out into a lead that's tough to catch. It seems like a scenario we may learn to react to, though. We shall see.
Designer Andreas Pelikan hit on something strong with Witch's Brew. Paired with Alexander Pfister, the two created a strong game in Broom Service. It's a B+ for me, a game I'm looking forward to playing more.
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