Got a board game recently called “Witchcraft!”, the follow-up to a game called “Resistance!”, switching up the theme from playing a resistance during the Spanish Civil War to playing witches defending a village from monsters during witch trials.
It’s a simple little resource utilization game, which makes it feel a little odd with just how much space it needs. There are a lot of cards, and your main deck uses extra large cards as well. It makes the art look nice and big, but it takes up a lot more room than you’d expect for a game that operates on such a simple and straightforward ruleset.
The long and short of it is that you’re trying to increase your “persuasion” value with three randomly selected villager cards that will act as jurors whenever you choose to initiate the witch trial, the end phase of the game. They have randomized difficulty thresholds, and you increase your persuasion by clearing mission cards, which themselves come with semi-random challenge cards. The actual act of play is straightforward - you hand is made from a deck of “witch” cards that have a power value and special effect. You also have three mission cards on table, that simply have a difficult value you need to exceed using the total witch power in your hand. Completing a mission lets you increase your persuasion with one of the jurors, meaning you’re earning their trust and are more likely to get an "innocent’ verdict at the trial by getting their persuasion higher than their randomized, hidden trial difficulty (there are ways to reveal those difficulties through the game, letting you make guess on when it’s safe to go to trial).
But when you’re spending witch power to beat a mission, you also flip over several challenge cards that also have their own difficulty values. Failing challenge cards almost always have penalties that push you closer to one of the several fail states of the game, and missions too can have negative effects activated under certain conditions. At any point in time, there are three missions to choose from on the field and sometimes missions and/or challenges can have penalties for simply choosing them, or even not choosing them that turn. Beating a mission usually nets you a really good reward (like adding additional witch cards to your deck, or revealing one of the juror’s trial difficulty values), but the challenge cards typically have no rewards themselves. You just want to clear them for the sake of not suffering their penalties.
But your hand of witch cards will virtually never have enough power strong enough to clear both the mission card and all of its challenge card all together. You always want to clear a mission a turn, using up some of the witch power from your hand, but then you have to pick your poison with what power you have left. You can’t beat every challenge, so you have to figure out which challenges you are most okay with suffering the penalties for.
Another big aspect is that the witch cards that make up your hand have two side to them, a “hidden” side representing the witch hiding their powers, and a “revealed” side that represents the witch unleashing their full power but consequently revealing their identity to the village. The revealed side will have stronger power values and stronger special effects, but those revealed witches get put into a “jail” deck and cannot be used for the rest of the game (unless you can rescue them through a special effect). Hidden witches just go into your regular discard, which gets shuffled into your deck once you run out of cards, so you’re having to figure out when you think it’s worth semi-permanently sacrificing one of your resources to clear any challenges you think could send you on a course for losing the game.
It’s a game all about picking your losses and trying to survive just long enough to get within a stone’s throw reach of winning the witch trial. You can choose to conduct the trial at the end of any turn, so you have to play chicken with the increasingly hurtful challenges versus taking a shot and winning the trial (the jurors have randomized persuasion thresholds you have to surpass, which you can reveal through the game, but it’s likely you may have to go into trial with incomplete information).
I’ve only played 1.5 games, but it seems like it could be a good time. I do wonder if it could have been shrunk down though.
