1-4 Players Ages 13+ 45-60 mins
**The following article is based on a preview copy and game elements may be subject to changes as part of the development and production process**
The DOALG team were deeply honoured to be entrusted our turn with the first review copy for Fate of Witches. This is a game that launches on Kickstarter on 12th September 2024. We naturally were delighted at the opportunity to review a game seen by few others and bringing our readers a glimpse of the future. As somebody who shares a last name with one of the infamous Pendle witches (Katherine Hewitt - executed in 1612) I was quite interested to check out this game and found it perhaps a little ironic that reviewing it would be in my hands. To check out the Kickstarter preview page click here.
The story of this game is as follows:
With the Grand High Witch dead, the heads of the local covens are competing to see who will fill her ruby slippers and conical hat. But their antics have not gone unnoticed; strange occurrences and mysterious disappearances have the villagers scared. With fear and suspicion running wild the witch hunter has been summoned.
Fate of Witches is a card game that puts players into the roles of coven head witches aiming to build the most powerful coven of witches (and possibly some converted villagers) and proving they are suited to the top position. Whilst doing this, however, players must avoid arousing the suspicions of the village and the witch hunter. This game therefore is about coven building and management but has some elements of card drafting and engine building as well. I would personally class this as a game of medium rules and strategy complexity, however none of the rules are difficult to follow once familiarity sets in.
The game components comprise of 116 cards (three decks, place holders and player aids) and 81 tokens. The quality of these is of course not guaranteed to match a final product but the ones we saw were of a good quality. While little can be said about card stocks etcetera, the same is not true of artwork; all the visual elements of this game are beautifully put together, from the slightly angular character design to the clear colour coding and text, creator and artist Peter Marshall has done a great job.
Setting up the game is pretty simple. Separate the Village, Well and Event decks and shuffle each of these. Place the Village deck in the centre and draw four cards and place these to the right of the deck to form the village square. Place the event and Well cards left of the village deck with the night, burn pile and on trial place holder cards above these. The day card is placed at the end of the village-square and the token supply laid out accessible to all players.
Once the game is laid out, each player takes a cauldron card (which serves as a divider between a player's living and deceased characters. The player who had the worst day claims the witches coin (first player marker). Each player is then dealt four cards and drafts one to their hand passing the rest to the player counterclockwise to them and this is repeated until each player has formed a four-card starting hand. Using the card drafting mechanic in this manner evens out the starting hands and makes it less likely that one player can achieve a decisive head start early on. With this step completed set up is complete and the game begins.
Play is broken down into 3 phases:
First is the day phase, in which each player in turn draws from either the village square (one face up card), Village deck (one card, blind draw) or the Well deck (draw 3 choose 1). After drawing, a player performs their coven actions; Upkeep, Cast and Cauldron. Upkeep allows a player to play a character or equipment (village or well) card to their coven. Cast is where a player uses the 'cast' ability of a character in their coven and resolves its effect. Lastly Cauldron, this is where a player may place/store a character from their hand on one turn, then on a later turn choose to use or ignore its cast ability before then placing the card on the burn pile. The cauldron mechanic may be the trickiest one to master. Its usefulness can initially seem to be pretty low, however when utilised properly can be beneficial to several strategies. For example, the cauldron card can let you use two cast abilities in a turn which can be very powerful if it complements a coven members ability. Also, as any characters revealed from the cauldron get sent to the burn pile this can be an effective way of discarding cards or scoring end game points.
The second phase is the night phase, during which the current first player draws the event card(s). When a night event is drawn the effect is resolved and often another card will be drawn. If a day event is drawn it is resolved and play moves into the next phase.
The last Phase is the Dawn where the village square is repopulated, and the first player token moves to the next player and the next round begins.
Sounds simple, but here is where the magic happens. All the characters have values ranging from -2 to +2. Villagers all start as negatives and witches start as positives. Throughout the game players and their opponents will use card effects to alter these values by blessing, cursing and enchanting characters in play. This means a -1 villager with two blessings (+2 modifiers) would have a value of +3 or a -2 Villager cursed (-2 Modifier) four times would be worth -10. However, any characters sacrificed (killed) enter the players graveyard. When this happens a character's, value is reversed, meaning negative becomes positive and vice versa. Enchanting characters (living only) in your coven has a cumulative effect that provides bonuses during the endgame scoring.
On top of all these player shenanigans, there are still the events to contend with. If players are not careful, their actions will trigger event effects causing their coven members to come under suspicion making them vulnerable to being dragged off to stand trial and possibly being placed on the burn pile and out of the game (except for end of game scoring effects). Once the last event card is revealed, each player takes one last day phase before scoring takes place. A player's score is calculated by the values of the living characters, dead characters (values reversed), end of game effects from characters and equipment, and any modifiers from enchantments and suspicion tokens.
So, what did the DOALG coven make of Fate of Witches? This is a game that focuses more on the darker side of witchcraft like Hocus Pocus rather than the more feared but useful/helpful to the community witches of the Discworld. And I feel that the game to a degree forces players to walk the dark path as the quickest way to earn points. However, the ability to kill-off players did not seem particularly common, which could leave players locked out of this strategy and finding it hard to keep up. Personally, I'd like to see some balancing of the light and dark paths to make it equally possible (profitable) to help the townsfolk and win them over as it is to curse and kill them off.
The theme of the witch trials is a good concept, but overall in this game I felt that the threat level from the games events and from other players was pretty low key. It seemed mostly to restrict what a player may do by making certain ability types dangerous to use or to give players an occasional chance to sabotage each other.
While each mechanic of this game is fairly straight forward, there is quite a bit to keep track of, hence classifying it as a medium weight game and I feel that the designers age range 13+ is accurate. On the topic of tracking, the player aid card has some useful information. However, this is the same on both sides of the card and we'd really like to see one side of this to have the anatomy of a turn to make it more informative. Additionally, several card effects could use a little clarification. For example, one card allows a player to use the ability of another players coven, however it is not explicitly stated the limitations of this effect. For example, do you simply use the ability as if it were in your own coven, or can you use it on their coven and for example sacrifice a high scoring witch and sabotaging the other player. Therefore, I feel that some card effects would benefit from clarification in the rulebook. Also, the term upkeep for the first play phase feels very misleading as in most other games this means you need to expend resources to maintain your assets, but this is not the case here as it is a phase for recruitment and equipping so a term more like 'manage' may work better.
But don't be fooled while this may seem like a big list of faults these are all minor details, and we really enjoyed this game. The artwork throughout all the game components is stunning. The theme and play style of light strategy are very entertaining. I especially like that the card drafting during setup and other game mechanics greatly reduce the likelihood of a runaway leader, which keeps the players focused on the game trying to scrape a few extra points to get in front and it still comes down to the wire with end of game effects as well. While I can't deny that Fate of Witches did not meet all my personal wishes for a witchcraft and witch trials game it is still a great little game for a night of games with your coven. So I defiantly recommend checking out the kickstarter here. And so I end this meeting by blessing this game with a 5/6 on the DOALG dice rating system.
Until next time; Stay safe, keep gaming and merry meet again.
Blessed be.
Samwise.
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