Designed by: Erik Andersson Sundén
In Whirling Witchcraft the players are competitive witches, killing with kindness, as they seek to ‘gift’ each other enough potion ingredients that their cauldrons will overflow…
Everyone takes a ‘workbench’ board and a character card, beginner or advanced, that tells you how many of each ingredient you start with (toads, spiders, mushrooms, mandrake and hearts of shadow) and what your particular special power is, if any. You also have three markers to track the progress of your three arcana: raven, book and potion. The players are dealt four potion cards each, and the game begins.
In every round, players simply choose one of the four potion cards and play it face-down to the table, before all revealing simultaneously. The potions are almost without exception very simple: turn one mandrake into two toads, for instance, or rustle up a heart fo darkness from two spiders and a mushroom. Some cards (with an arrow) can be played only one way, others can be flipped whichever orientation you like. Basically though, you’ll be spending X from your workbench to make Y, and everything you make will be passed to your neighbour on the right: you goal is to have their ingredients overflow, because anything they can’t fit into their workbench comes back to you as points.
Before the potions are concocted, however, there’s the small matter of arcana powers. These activate when the markers reach numbers 2, 4 and 6 on the arcana track: the raven allows you to remove two cubes from anywhere on your workbench, the book allows you to use one type of ingredient from the supply instead of your workbench (for one round only), and the potion allows you to throw a cube from the supply into your cauldron before it gets passed to your neighbour.
That’s pretty much the game. What first seems helpful – here, have a mushroom – swiftly becomes overwhelming, as everyone plays more potion cards in every round, and uses as many of them as they’d like/can afford to. If anyone can’t actually fit any cubes they receive onto their workbench, they go into your witches circle instead (on your home board): the first player to generate 5 cubes this way instantly wins!
As the goal of the game is to sabotage, there is a mild sense of being slapped around the face.
Very low - all players play at the same time, so the only down-time is if anyone is struggling to make a choice...
...but with only four cards to choose from, nobody should really be turning Witchcraft into a non-whirling slog.
There are numerous character cards to choose from, and the fall of the potion cards varies.
2-5
Players
8+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
As fun as my first few games of Whirling Witchcraft were, I'm not sure it's something we'd return to again and again, because although it takes the oft-seen heads-down-puzzling and makes it more interactive, the moment by moment experience is still a little computational - and there's a fair amount of game management as everyone shuffles cubes around in each round. Because of that, it doesn't feel like a game that conjures quite as much laughter as it could... but, that said, Whirling Witchcraft wasn't damp squib either and one thing it gets right that a few games could learn from is it not outstaying its welcome. A short, simple game where players who enjoy the brevity, speediness and silliness of it all - as well as the goal of spoiling tactics! - will find engaging and rewarding.