The Village Crone

EvEvanstar10.0

This game is another that feels close to being good, but falls short somewhere. The general idea is that the players are witches, casting spells on these poor villagers. To cast the spells, you need to spend ingredients. Ingredients are collected by your little familiar tokens on the board. During your turn, if you meet the conditions of your scoring cards, you can bank them as points, and then you get to look at the top card from each of the scoring card piles and pick one to replace the card you banked. This gives you a peek at what could be the goals of the other players in the future. Where the game falls is that the difficulty of keeping track of other players is a little too much, and there's a counter-spell in the game, that can cancel someone's spell, but still make them discard the ingredients, and it can even counter itself, so players get into these silly counter battles at the end which isn't really interesting or fun, because players are spending resources they need to win, to stop someone else from winning, which means whoever doesn't get stuck with the job of countering tends to be in a strong position. I wanted to like this so much. ☆ Art, Iconography and components functional ☆ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ☆ Multiple plays stay interesting ☆ Low or mitigatable luck elements ☆☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment