What irony it is that a game called
Unreliable Wizard is in fact precisely calibrated to deliver the exact same
experience every time you open the box. Tedium. [Sad trombone] I wanted this game to be not boring. Unreliable Wizard?! I live for that title! Backed
the crowdfunding campaign, rule book unseen, because my gosh
what a title! What self-expression! Get in the bin Hemingway, here's
a short story in *two* words. And I take no joy in saying this. I absolutely
have no desire to trash a little board game that couldn't, but Unreliable Wizard
should have remained just that. A title. The gist is that you are the unreliable
wizard - I mean, you'd hope so wouldn't you? You travel across a map composed out of cards, trying to reach the end and defeat
the boss, and rescue the princess. If you die along the way you lose. The way you don't die is by getting better
at casting spells that do more damage. There are eight other monsters on
the map and if you defeat them, you'll get a reward - either a
companion that increases your damage, or more spell components that
lets you cast more complex spells. The problem is that fighting these
monsters will reduce your health, and also travelling on the
map reduces your health. So maybe that's where the game
lies - in clever selection of what terrain you will travel on,
and what monsters you will face... Dear viewer, absolve yourself of such notions
because none of these decisions exist. The simple gist of Unreliable Wizard is
that you just do everything that you can, and whether you succeed or fail largely
depends on what cards you draw when. Each time you do face a monster you won't know what monster you will face
or what reward lies underneath. 'Ha-ha!' You might say. Your
information - it's unreliable. No. It's not unreliable, because for something
to be unreliable, it first needs to be. When you encounter a monster, you immediately
fight it. Reduce its health to zero, and you win! Each combat round you are allowed to compose your spell book from any spell
component cards you possess. Then decide on a number of cards to
draw - which can be any amount you like up to four - and as long as one card remains
undrawn. And then simply draw that many cards. Each card you draw is a dip
into the forbidden arcane laws. Or, in rules terms, one damage to you. However, if you found more
advanced spell components, these might combine with the basic
ones for bigger blasts of energy. Including the advanced spells into the pool
of cards you draw from is a risky proposition. If you draw them...but...nothing to actually
combine them with, then they do nothing. To round out this roulette of unreliable spells
is the second grimoire, which you might find as a reward for defeating a monster, that expands
your spell repertoire to ridiculous blasts. Once again, if you draw the right cards. Again, this feels like a setup
for decisions. Not only do you get to choose which cards you
draw from, but also how many. And after all, each dip into chance is a
precious health that dwindles so... reliably. Each monster also has resistances
to certain colour spells, and what terrain you encounter the
monster in also affects its defenses. Finally, your companions will also increase
the damage of certain colour spells, on top of whatever ability they offer, leading you to specialise in different
runs with different colours. The promise of that is so rarely
delivered in gameplay that I wouldn't be particularly wrong if I said those
decisions just don't come up at all, and you jam in every card you can - draw as
much as you're allowed - and hope for the best. Sometimes, red spells will obviously be bad, no matter how you slice it, so you
just don't put the red cards in. That is technically a decision, as much as it is a decision to eat when you're hungry
and there's food in the fridge. It is solitaire automatic (and by
solitaire I mean the card game, not solo games. You know what I mean). The map you travel on is
perhaps the biggest let-down. It is the same exact map every time you play. Each terrain costs progressively more
health to travel, whereas some locations give you a once per game heal boost. But the puzzle is identical, and
some spaces are even superfluous. This hex? It has no reason to exist. There is no tactical decision you can make in this
game that would give you a reason to go there. Why does it exist?! Who knows?! But what I do know is that you can reliably draw the most sensible path and
follow it each time you play. This monotony can be broken up by companions. When you defeat a monster you'll get some health
back, and also sometimes get spells as rewards. Other times, companions. Each companion increases damage
in one spell colour or another, but that depends on which side
you select when you obtain them. The different sides also have different
permanent abilities, such as a health discount on certain types of terrain, or
extra damage to certain kinds of monsters. In fact, the difficulty of any given play is largely determined by what
companions you draw when. If you fish out the princess that gives
you a discount of two health on card draws in combat in your starting setup,
congrats! You've already won the game. Whereas, if you find her just before the final
battle, it's not that she's not useful. It's that most of her potential has already evaporated
away together with any sense of tension. Which is where you might say 'Aha! But companions
have two abilities - just use the different side!' And my answer to that is... Yes. Automatic decisions. And thus you trundle through the
same map, fighting the same monsters, getting the same rewards, drawing the
same cards, casting unreliable spells. Will it do enough damage? Arghhh, not this time! The monster
will strike back. Let's try again! On and on it goes. And it's such a shame too
because aesthetically and conceptually this is such
an appealing proposition. I already said I love the title, but there's something to be said about how
cute and dorky the eight-bit art looks. It's minimalist, gets to the chase with
charm and style, and carries the tone well. There's a little select arrow above the wizard! I want to like this! It looks so good! It's
a great package, a brilliant little product. I wanted the game to match that. The issue isn't that this is a wizard on rails. I mean, no, that is an issue - but the
actual issue is how binary the results are. Every time you fight a monster, you either succeed
or fail with some semi convoluted card draws. If the wizard is indeed unreliable, I want
it to cast a fireball in its own face, summon some sort of an interdimensional
demon, turn the paladin's sword into a ladle, shower the continent in confetti! Now, it will consistently
and reliably do X number of damage every turn where X is a random card draw. But... Okay, there's no redeeming this
game. Even with an expansion. But I wanted to showcase what makes an interesting
solo only game and give you some examples of games that succeeded in the past, including one
by the same publisher as Unreliable Wizard. A solo game has no opponents, so how does a
player win if they have no one to compete against? The less elegant solutions are to introduce
an AI opponent or score attack. But the most clean way to do this is to create a
binary win-lose system, and to create tension in that environment you need to include
a randomiser such as card draws or dice rolls. If you didn't include a randomiser, you did not design a solo game,
you designed a solvable puzzle. Often randomisers determine
whether you succeed or fail. Roll a die, did you get the right number? Please proceed forward... not
you though, you rolled a two. So now we arrive precisely at where
Unreliable Wizard stands, but the real challenge of designing a randomiser is for the
results of that randomiser to produce choices. The luck isn't an issue, it's a matter of
being able to do *something* with that luck. Let me show you a game that does this very well. Witchcraft! is an absolutely agonising puzzle. A deck builder that asks you to send your
witches to missions of do-goodery to convert the local towns folk into favourable
jury members in an upcoming witch trial. Each of these missions features a difficulty, but also a bunch of obstacles that you cannot
see until you commit to doing that mission. These obstacles offer hindrances such as
gaining an extra duff card in your deck, which does doesn't do anything and is annoying. Or benefits like recruiting
an extra witch into your deck. The problem is that all of these
cards also have a difficulty number. So you have to decide how much you're
going to commit to the mission, to the obstacles that you want to overcome,
and to the benefits that you want to get. In addition to that your witches themselves
are a delight of various powers and abilities. However, when you select a witch
to send to a mission you have to decide whether you're going to send
her on her hidden or revealed side. Revealed witches have much stronger abilities
but are permanently removed from your deck as soon as you play them, which is a squirm-inducing
decision - not just because missions only get harder and every witch matters, but also
because witches play off of each other. Encountering a mission that's harder than
anticipated asks you to sacrifice potential boons for future missions, in exchange
for breaking up really powerful combos. Thus you have a randomiser - in this
case deck building and card draws. But failing to draw the right
numbers isn't the end all and be all. The question is what you can extract from
that failure. It's the difference between putting a coin in a slot machine and feeling
numb, and an all-out organised casino heist. No play of Witchcraft! feels the same. In part, that's because there's
so much variability in what your deck will look like, in what
missions you'll have to face, what jurors you'll have to convince... but
mostly it's because no decision feels alike. It's always a different conundrum and that
makes for a truly exceptional experience. But what if it's not the same puzzle every time? Solo games are enriched when
they have multiple scenarios. Witchcraft! does this with its campaign
mode, but so do other solo-only games like... One Deck Galaxy, a game we've reviewed in
the past and the link is in the description. It lets you compose your character by
combining your home world with your society, with five of each included in the box. There's also five different adversaries
and multiple difficulty levels. This modularity isn't a panacea and
it won't make a bad game amazing. But it does let you tailor different
strategies towards different challenges by adding multiple spaces to explore, and
a difficulty adjustment might reveal new depths that weren't evident in
previous less demanding plays. Finally, a solo game can make randomisers
tremendously more interesting by strategically choosing which information to reveal
and which information to keep hidden. In Unreliable Wizard both the
monsters and the rewards are hidden, meaning you probably want to visit
all of them in a given play to ensure you find the right components
for whatever build you're going for. Whereas say, if either the monsters or the
rewards were visible, you might be forced to make more strategic choices in terms of which monsters
you'll fight or how you'll travel across the map. A game that does this excellently is
Maquis - a harrowing tale of French resistance soldiers gathering supplies and
completing missions in an occupied village. Each turn, you will send one of your
fighters to any of the locations in the village to gather food, medicine, supplies,
guns - things needed for the resistance. However, after you do that you have to draw a patrol card - which tells
you where to place a guard. If guards ever surround the escape route and
corner your fighter, it is permanently lost. Thus, each dip is an agonising
roll of a roulette of death. You can play it safe by tracing a line of
fighters who will create a safe passage back, but then you are not achieving enough with your
placements because some locations are just duds. But fear not! For pushing your
luck is far from arbitrary. The deck that reveals guard locations has
odds and probabilities that you can learn. Especially if you print out this
fan-made player-aid from BGG. Adding layers and layers of information simply by choosing to make the discard pile
of this deck open information. Maquis has all the other bells and
whistles, like multiple mission cards that basically let you craft custom
scenarios and modify their difficulty, and variability by letting you build
special buildings in the middle of the board - like this safe house that is basically
a second location my fighters can return to. Ha-ha guards! Take that! Can't catch me! Unreliable Wizard is such a shame, especially with an expansion
that increased variability and difficulty but failed to make that
variability produce meaningful choices. It is okay for a little box where you
just sit with it and waste some time, because we all need that sometimes. But there's just better games
to spend your time with. See you soon.
