by Quermitt
I had my first play yesterday (2 players) and to be honest the game lived up to nearly all expectations.Setting up the game was nice and easily done and immediately immersed us in the atmosphere needed for the game. This of course due to the brilliant art work on the components, especially the megameeples. I was not entirely sure up front why they made this all so big in stead of going smaller (as it does not contribute to the qualities of the game content wise) but what an overall gaming experience they make! You do not play the game, you live it ...
Explaining the rules was a bit tricky, but worked fine in the end. No speed bumps, no unclear stuff, nice humor in the book.
The game itself seemed to work out quite 'easy' at first and we were truly convinced this was going to be a ride in the park, but some of the smaller print in the rules (such as not being able to immediately travel from city to city) made it a lot harder. Once you beat Baba Yaga a first time, the skeletal army makes you live miserable and then you haven't encountered those spidery thingies yet!!!
All in all it came very close. We nearly lost some spellbooks (though in the end we lost none) and the hats getting to the end of their tracks nearly cost us victory. We checked and if the game would have lasted for one more turn, victory would have gone to evil B.Y. because of both blue and red hats getting to the end position of their respective tracks.
As it turned out we got to do final battle to the evil long-chinned one with four spell books and to be honest this was were the game did not really meet up to my expectations. There is a rule saying that you can use a spellbook to discard a moon card, even the minions that can normaly not be discarded. As there were only two moon cards present (skeletons and spiders) we discarded those two so B.Y. only had her basic strength of two. We had six already! Out came the stones and we obliterated her with 10 to 2 since we had two more spellbooks giving us +2 strength and we ensured enough sunstones during the game so another +2 there.
To round up we had a wonderfull evening being immersed in this fairy tale. We enjoyed the walk in the park at first, struggled through some difficult turns with interesting choices to make and in the end defeated the old hag turning us back in our normal, handsome human forms. The final struggle in the end never came as the difficulty of the game had clearly already passed, but I see good possibilities to remedy this by only allowing to discard one moon symbol per spellbook or something like that.
We will see how we remedy this, but this one definately is one of the better co-ops I have ever played! This one is a stayer and I absolutely wish to express my sympathy with the people who are running a thread in this game's entry who are debating the fact that this game was clearly bought by many only to resell it immediately at a higher cost. Really guys, this is not one to end up in some collector's cupboard collecting dust, this one needs to see tabletime absolutely! This is a very well-meant plead to those who have solely bought this one to make good money on it: Do not keep those willing to play this game from being able to do so only to earn you a couple of euros! That is not what this game was meant to be for.
So evil, nasty grinning Baba Yaga, we meet again!:D
Cheers guys!