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In Whirling Witchcraft, you are witches combining ingredients to complete spells. When you cast your spell over a neighbouring opponent, there’s a chance you’ll overload that Wiccan’s workbench. This is good because they get a bounce back 5 times and they’ll lose. And you’ll be crowned the Whirliest Witch of them all!
Spellbinding Set up
To play this game, everybody needs an (asymmetric) personality card, cauldron, workbench board, a hand of spell cards, and a bonus power arcana card. Your personality card will set out your starting ingredients as well as your particular power. The basic Initiate personality is recommended for your first game, but you’ll quickly want the powers of the more experienced spell casters for sure!
Once you’re all set up, everyone decides which spells they can incant, and then simultaneously starts mixing up magic!
Spells
Spells are a combination of inputs and outputs. If you can input the needed ingredient cubes from your workbench onto that section of your spell card, then you can add cubes from the general supply to the output section. Those output cubes then go into your cauldron ready to be sent to the player on your right. Once they receive them, they must add them to the matching colour sections on their workbench. The input ingredients you used from your own workbench go back into the general supply.
Arcana Cadabra
At the start of the game, everyone gets 3 arcana tokens. Then, throughout the game, if you cast a spell card with any arcana symbols on it, you get to move those tokens in one space on your arcana card track. Once a token is on an even number, you can use that arcana bonus power to mix things up in one of three whirling witchcraft ways.
- The Raven lets you remove two ingredients from your own workbench and put them back into the general supply.
- The book lets you take one type of ingredient from the general supply and use them to fill the input section of spell cards.
- The cauldron lets you add an extra ingredient from the general supply into your cauldron ready to be sent off to your neighbouring witch.
Set Spell To Phases
Every round, you pick a card from your hand of four spell cards. Even if you don’t have the necessary ingredients on your workbench to make it, you still have to pick one. Once everyone has studied the cards are revealed simultaneously and placed next to any spell cards you played in previous rounds. If there are any arcana symbols on your current spell card, move the corresponding token along on the tracker. Don’t forget if it hits an even number, you can trigger its bonus power now.
Take the spell input ingredients for your spell cards (new and any already played) from your workbench board and then grab the corresponding output ingredients for all the cards with complete inputs from the general supply.
Then pass your cauldron to the player on your right. They are going to curse you when they realise, they have to add all those cubes onto their workbench. From the cauldron, you must place those cubes on the corresponding rows on your own workbench board.
If you receive more of one ingredient than there is space for, it gets placed in the witch’s circle of the player who passed their cauldron to you. Anyone can have 5 ingredients in their circle, they win! If nobody has won that round, you pass all remaining recipe cards in your hand to the player on your left. Everyone refills their hand up to 4 cards, and a new round begins.
Cute Cauldron
The cardboard cauldrons in Whirling Witchcraft look ace! A bit fiddly to handle if you’re passing them around. But they look super on the table and definitely help to enhance the theme of the game.
Get Set Brew
Above all, Whirling Witchcraft is an engine builder. But it is one with a magical twist. You need to get ingredients to make ingredients. But then you send your hard-earned stuff to your neighbour. It’s a generous and selfless twist on resource management.
What keeps the magical engine revving? The ongoing power mainly comes from previously filled recipe cards. Plus, with ingredients currently on your own board, every new spell gets a boost!
But you need to know which spell to cast and when. Inputs can be taken from your workbench. This clears space and reduces the risk of ingredient overload. But chaining spells in the right order is really where you excel in Whirling Witchcraft.
Arcana powers also come into their own once your board starts to fill up. Use the powers wisely and your engine will be purring like a pussycat soon enough!
Boiled Balance
You need cubes and arcana, but not too many. With room for only 3 black Hearts of Shadow, compared to 9 mushrooms, spells that crowd out your opponent’s board is going to be a winning whirl! So, if you can keep at least one eye on what the player to your right is doing, you might be able to push them over the edge on a few resources with smartly selected spells that crank out the right coloured cubes every round.
Don’t forget to check what is heading your way, however. Knowing what you are likely to get can help to stop workbench overload or even provide you with ingredients you are going to need for your own spells!
Luck Of The Draw
You won’t always have perfect spells although their names are great. But that is the luck of the draw when faced with a hand of spell cards.
Coven Time
The more cauldrons bubbling, and the faster they are filling, the more fun this game is to play. It’s simultaneous action of the most magical variety! Watching a cauldron head your way filled to the brim with cubes is like watching a crash in slow motion. You know it’s coming. You can’t do anything to stop it, but that won’t reduce the crushing blow. The card swapping and cauldron filling have more colourful sparks at higher player counts. I would say that it feels a little odd that the person you take ingredients from, and the one you give to, stays the same regardless of player count. But with other players directly affecting others, you often profit from another meta battle going down in the main game.
Cubism
We do find the ingredient cubes a little small and they tend to slide around the basic boards and on the shiny cards somewhat. A dual-layered board that stops the cubes from sliding around so much would have been excellent. The rule book is also a little bit confusing the first few times you read it. For a game that is very simple to play, the rules did make us think it was going to be a lot more complicated than it turned out to be. Having the arcana tracker on the back of the player aid is also a bit fiddly and requires token flipping to quickly check turn actions.
Winning Witches
Despite those niggles, this debut game from designer Eric Andersson Sundén is really quite innovative, and definitely takes engine building somewhere different!
Overall, Whirling Witchcraft is a fun, light, fast colourful game. For us, the real enjoyment definitely shines brightest at higher player counts.
