Designed by: Alexander Pfister,Andreas Pelikan
In Broom Service players take on the role of witches and druids, gathering herbs and delivering potions.
Each player begins with an identical (save for the coloured back) set of cards – witches, druids, gatherers and a weather fairy. Everyone chooses four cards of their ten with which to start the round. The starting player plays a card and, if they have a matching card, each subsequent player must follow suit. But – and this is the crux of the game – on your turn, you choose how to play the card – be it brave, or cowardly. Play cowardly and you receive an instant – but small – reward. Play bravely and the returns are bigger – but there is a risk. For there is no instant reward – if any subsequent player has the same card, they can choose to play bravely also, which means you get nothing! So when playing bravely you’re calculating – or hoping – nobody going after you will have the same card.
Witch cards move your witches around the board – a landscape dotted with towers and clouds – and if they are brave, they’ll also deliver potions to the towers (for victory points, and sometimes wands). Druids merely deliver to a tower in an area your witch already occupies, Gatherers gain you new potions (and also wands) and the weather fairy uses the aforementioned wands to get rid of clouds in any area your witch is adjacent to. Getting rid of clouds means witches and druids can now go into the areas previously blocked by them, and deliver to towers that give bigger rewards. And the clouds themselves give you victory points at the end of the game, depending on how many you have.
Finally, each round there is an Event card that can have positive or negative effects. After each turn the last brave player starts the new turn, and once all players have played all cards, the round is over and a new one begins. After seven rounds the game ends.
Do not be fooled by the colourful art and fantasy stylings; Broom Service can bite you on the behind!
Oh yes. There's a whole bunch of Take That in Broom Service, and by the end of your first game you'll realise how crucial everything is - which cards you choose, where you move your witch, whether you play cowardly or brave, and - not least - turn order, which is everything in this game.
Extremely low. Cardplay involves everyone - actually activating your cards shouldn't take long.
The crux of the game isn't mental arithmetic - it's trying to balance the cards you really want with the cards you think your opponents will take. With less than five players one of the player decks is used to 'Bewitch' certain cards in each round - they can still be chosen, but doing so costs you three points on the score track.
Almost impossible to play the same way twice, Broom Service offers huge, swingy, variety. The base game is described above, but the box also comes with extra elements to mix in once you're familiar with it.
2-5
Players
10+
Years
60-90
Mins
Sam says
My first game at Broom Service I was lagging behind but had concocted a beautifully orchestrated move to get me back in contention... only for it to blow up in my face. Broom Service is just like that - there's a palpable tension when cards are selected and played, because the very concept of a best laid plan is exceedingly... optimistic. Unless it involves playing all your cards in a cowardly fashion - and that's a very unlikely route to victory. That part of the game is potentially brutal fun... but I have to say the stuff on the board felt a bit stodgy compared to that central idea, and it never became a go-to game for us.