Dave Reviews: Being Turned Into A Playtesting Newt

The Village Crone

The witches of Wickersby have a nice selection of familiars. Snakes, bats, ravens (ok, crows, but I like ravens better), little critters run around the town stealing away their resources and bringing them back for the witches to use in their spells. So many, in fact, that one wonders why anyone still lives in Wickersby. 

Well... if they didn't, there would be no game. 

And it's that attention to detail that marks The Village Crone.

The Village Crone revolves around two things: collecting spell ingredients and casting spells. Through these two activities, and moving your familiars and the villagers around the board, let you fulfill the witch schemes that score you points. Thirteen points, of course, gives you the win.

There are six boards, each with a different village location, that can be set up in different configurations to change the game a bit each time you play. The Forge, Mill, Farm, and Lord's Manor are where your familiars can collect ingredients (two at the end of each round); the Tithe Barn is where you put one ingredient at the start of each round, unless you have a familiar there; and the Village Green has no specific effect, but it's where your new familiars show up. If someone binds the area, nothing can enter or exit, and so your familiars might be stuck there or not be able to enter the game at all.

The spells you cast are quite stereotypically witchy. You can magically create a romance between two of the villagers, turn them into frogs, summon villagers to certain locations or swap the positions of villagers and familiars, and even counter the spells of other witches. The witch schemes—worth one, two, or three points, and requiring you to meet the same number of objectives in one turn—generally work around these spells. You may be required to summon a given villager to a certain location, make them fall in love with someone, turn them into a frog, etc. One of the entertaining aspects of the game is that the schemes fit the concept of the evil witch well—you might bring two people together, then turn one of them into a frog (or both if they're in love, since they share fates), then bind the area so they can't leave.

In fact, the game's aesthetic is quite good. It has a gloomy feel, though not to the point of being depressing, and the fact they don't go away from what everyone connects with witches isn't a problem. If you expect witches to do hexes and love spells and such, you get that, and it's well done.

The game itself, though, has some real issues. There are numerous games which advertise themselves as being suitable for a wider player count range than is really true, and this is in that category—do not play this with six people, and probably not with five—but the problems run deeper than that. Sure, there's a lot of downtime when the game is big, and that's not fun, but the designers didn't even create enough scheme cards to accommodate the realities of a larger game. With six people, not only are you almost guaranteed to run out of level three schemes, you may come close to running out of schemes entirely unless someone runs away with the game.

Furthermore, although the schemes are very much in line with the theme, and often inherently tell a quick story (which is great), there isn't much variety. To some extent, this is a result of the decision for each scheme to have one requirement for each point being scored. It makes sense, but combined with the "witchy" aspect of the schemes, it limits the number of ways to differentiate them, at least mechanically (ie. a bunch of switch-spell requirements will ask the same thing even if they require different pairs of characters to be switched).

Fixing the issue of repetitive schemes would take a little imagination, so maybe they tried but couldn't find a better method. OK. What I wonder, though, is if they limited the number of scheme cards overall because of the repetition. If that's the case, they screwed themselves twice at once, because including enough scheme cards not only would have allowed a larger game to look like it made sense, but repetition in the schemes may have been more expected. "There are so many schemes, you're going to see them a few times," that kind of thing.

It's unfortunate that the point scoring becomes a problem, because the rest is pretty good. It's complicated trying to make sure you have all the ingredients you need for the plan you want to hatch on your next turn, which can then be changed by someone else frogging/unfrogging/teleporting/enforcing romance in a way that makes you do even more to get your schemes to work. It makes the game take longer than you might want, which is another issue for new players, but it's not bad.

Really, just stick to a three or four player game of this and you should have a reasonably good time. It's quite OK. ...yeah.

Score: Eight frogs out of thirteen.