Witch of Salem — How to Play, and Why It's a Gem

hi there welcome to an episode of board gems board gems is my weekly video series in which i take an older board game a board game that's usually 10 years old or often much older and talk about a little bit and say why it's still a good game and everybody should still be playing this game i'd like to push back against the the tendency in the board game hobby to always be on the lookout for the new things and you know there are some old games out there maybe they're not that hard to find some of them are but uh you know if you find a used copy or you see one you know in the the back of some uh shelf of some game store somewhere uh you'll remember maybe that it's a good game and you should pick it up now the games i've been doing recently haven't been that that old a lot of them have been about 10 years old and one feudality i ended up breaking up my own rule not realizing that it was less than 10 years old so i apologize for that and this week's is not that old either but don't worry in the next couple weeks we'll do some older games but i wanted to do this one because halloween's coming up and it's which is salem now which of salem was not designed by wolfgang holbein wolfgang holbein is a german fantasy and science fiction author and he's one of the most prolific or most successful in germany as far as i know and which of salem or the german version anyway is the german translation of this is uh one of his uh book series and it's kind of as you can kind of maybe feel from the the artwork it's uh it's very lovecraftian um in inspiration and it's published by cosmos the actual designer is mikhail rinek now cosmos and mikhail renek do a lot of work together because cosmos very often makes board games about books and mikael reeneck has designed a number of them such as um around the world in 80 days he co-designed pillars of the earth he did one on bram stoker's dracula for the cosmos two-player series and he did this one so i don't know anything about the designer other than of course the games he's designed and but i in my head i just picture cosmos is like hey we got the rights to this book hey mikhail do you want to make a game it's like i'll have it on your desk by the end of the week that's what i like to picture that in my head i'm sure it's not true anyway um so as you can see it's a lovecraftian themed it's a horror game it's a cooperative game it was published in 2008 by cosmos uh it's for two to four players although you could play it solo with one caveat which is that there is some hidden information but you can play with that hidden information open would actually make the game a little bit easier because this is a known game to be extremely challenging extremely challenging co-op game uh it takes about an hour to play and the box says ages 12 and up that's probably a little bit cautious i think 10 and up could probably play this um there might be some slight concern about the horror theme but the game isn't scary at all obviously it has kind of monstrous images because you're you're defeating monsters there are zombies there are other horrible things from the deep to worry about but i wouldn't say they're extremely scary don't play with little kids anyway but 10 and up i think should be fine i'll show you how it plays first how about that then let's talk about why this game is special and why it's a board gem to set up the game place the board on the table between the players take the necron marker and place it on this space here place the witch of salem piece place it on miskatonic university space zero place the die somewhere kind of in the middle of the board within reach of all players now i've got all the cards sleeved because this actually came from the restaurant and the backs got damaged a bit so i have opaque sleeves so it's still playable so you shuffle up all the great old ones that's these the six these six cards and you're going to shuffle those up and you're going to place one here on the underwater prison this is the great old one that you must reveal and then defeat the other five get placed around this corner of the board you'll see there's spaces with numbers one two three four and five and this is a little little aid so that you can see the six old ones and what you need to defeat them just place that in the corner there somewhere these are the monsters there's many different types of creatures and for every type there's two so there's two deep ones there's two show goats shaw got shaw goats so you're gonna shuffle this up place that near near the board there are 12 event cards that look something like this you're going to shuffle them up and you're going to discard four of them sight unseen and place the other eight somewhere near the board whenever the event deck runs out take the discards these eight and the remaining four that you set aside earlier and shuffle them all up and have a new draw pile of eight these tokens there's eight of them there's the back this is the back and on the front it'll show either a blank wall or it'll show a rift so you're going to mix these up face down and you're going to place one on each of these six locations numbered one to six there's gonna be two left over they go out of the game sight unseen four of the eight tokens have rifts four of the eight have blank walls so what if you if you place six on the board two to four of them are going to have rifts but you don't know which ones then give each player one player board in their color it has room for three items as well as one artifact give each player a sanity marker which will go on space six if ever as you lose sanity the sanity marker will go down if ever reaches zero this player is eliminated and if all players are eliminated they've all gone insane the game is over with a loss each player also gets a pawn which starts in the university as well as a small deck of eight location cards there's one card for every one of the seven locations on the board numbered zero one all the way to six and there is also a secret passage so players can just keep that and as their hand no need to shuffle so each player gets one let's put a couple pawns here simulate a three player game and finally you're going to add tokens there's a bag of tokens there's items and there's artifacts you're going to start with location 1 and fill it up left to right with items from the back determine the start player the start player will stay the same throughout the course of the game the start player gets this card which tells them how many creatures they are going to add to the board before their turn so one complete round is add creatures to the board then every player takes one turn then draw an event and then repeat in the case of a two-player game the start player will add one creature to the board every round in a four-player game they will add two creatures per round and the three-player game they take turns so they'll start adding one creature and then next time add two and then next time add one again now there are many ways to lose in this game players lose if all the players lose all their sanity and they all go insane over the course of the game players will be revealing these great old ones in fact we start with one revealed so this one you know is not here this is not the one you're going to be trying to banish by the end but this these may come into play in the form of shadows we'll talk about that later so your goal is to reveal all these six cards all the great old ones and you have to reveal them in order when you reveal the sixth card then that's when you're able to banish the monster but you must reveal the sixth card before the necron marker reaches this corner otherwise you lose and then you must banish this great old one and close the rift at the university before this marker reaches here assuming you're able to do all of that then you reveal all these tokens some of them have rifts some of them don't each rift must be sealed with an artifact matching the location so at the end assuming that you've won every other way you flip over all these tokens and if there is even one portal which is not sealed with an artifact you lose and if there's one blank wall which was accidentally sealed with an artifact you lose but we'll return to that because there's a there's a way to make the game easier well i'll talk about that in a bit so the first thing that happens in a round is you add a creature so the start player is going to add one or two creatures depending on how many players and the creature always gets added to one of the six locations they don't get added to the university but the other six and it's always the next one from the uh which of salem so you look at the next one in sort of it's sort of clockwise it goes like this but it goes up and then by the time you reach six it resets to zero miskatonic university is where the witches salem is that zero so the first creature gets added to the next one over which is one the first creature in the game is always added to the sanatorium now one creature by itself in one location of arkham horror doesn't really do a lot nothing bad is happening other than if you go to the sanatorium you'll encounter that creature but you could ignore the sanatorium and the creature won't bother you the catch is that there's two of every creature in this deck if ever you reveal a creature that is already on the board then instead of adding that creature instead the one that's already on the board activates and a bad thing happens the bad thing is printed on the bottom in this case each player would lose to sanity like so it's not strictly necessary to defeat creatures defeat monsters but if you don't then as the board fills up with monsters they're more likely to activate and more likely bad things are going to happen but over the course of the game you definitely want to keep the monsters kind of in check but you also need to collect these items these items all do different things but moreover they help you defeat the monsters to defeat this blood hunter a player would need to have two daggers in their inventory so these are the daggers here and as players add items to their inventory they're gonna be adding it to their board there if they can go to that location and encounter the creature and have the items necessary to defeat the creature then the creature can be defeated and they don't give up the items to do so you don't have to discard the two daggers you just have to have them in your possession but we'll see how that works on a player's turn they do several things the first thing they do is choose a location to go to they have one card for each of the seven locations on the board and a card which is called secret passage and the secret passage allows you to go anywhere with the with the caveat that it costs you one sanity so you can play any location if you play for example the arkham news then you will take your pawn and you will go to the arkham news like so now that car stays face up and you don't have access to that card anymore when yellow's turn comes up next they must choose a different location let's say they chose the cemetery next time they would choose a cemetery and they would go to this location and these cards remain unavailable until at some point they go to miskatonic university when they do so they go to this location and they get to pick up all their cards again so let's say they go to a location if there is another player at that location then they may trade one item you can only make one trade with one player you can give an item that you have to them and they can give an item that they have to you so you trade you can have up to three items and you can have one artifact but you can't trade artifacts then if there's a creature in that location in the space for the card here then you encounter it now encountering a creature means rolling the die and suffering the effects they're all bad they're all bad things here there's one side for each one of the four different types of items and if you roll that then you immediately discard one of those from your player board if you have it if you don't have it nothing happens if you roll this you lose one sanity and if you roll this the necron marker moves one space and then assuming you still have the items necessary you can try to defeat the monster in order to do so you need to have in your possession the items shown on the top of the card the blood hunter requires two daggers so you have to have two daggers in your inventory if you do then you can defeat the creature and the creature simply goes away into a discard pile nothing else happens so as you can see it is possible to have two daggers think you're going to defeat the blood hunter go here roll the die get this have to discard a dagger and unless you had three now you don't have enough to defeat the blood hunter and you kind of wasted your trip there so that's that's the risk you have to be a little bit lucky when you try to defeat a creature the witch of salem which moves around the board every round offers some benefits to the players who are in the same location as them and one of the benefits is that if the witch of salem is in a location that the player goes to and there's a creature there and the player doesn't have to roll the die after they encounter the creature and possibly defeat it then you may use one item in your inventory now there's four different types of items and they each do different things and there are also artifacts using a necronomicon allows you to reveal the next great old one that's around the board eventually you'll have to reveal all of them and this one before the necron marker reaches the corner the dagger allows you to instantly defeat a creature even if you don't have the items necessary the catch is that you have to be in the location with the witch of sailor the pink potion allows you to restore one salary up to a maximum of six and again if you use the item in a location with the witch of salem you get an extra benefit which is it heals one more sanity and finally the glasses now the glasses i have to explain this a little bit so so here's the thing okay about these tokens here these walls two to four of them have rifts two to four of them don't in order to win the game you have to seal all the rifts all two to four of them of course at the beginning of the game you don't know which walls have rifts on them in order to determine this you need to spend glasses when you spin glasses that you have on your player board they get discarded to the side of the board and then you can peek at the wall at your current location and that's all you would do the glasses go away according to the rules and it says it in the rules this is very important it says it in bold players are not allowed to reveal information about what they saw which makes the game even more difficult and it is already a very difficult game so for your first few games don't worry about it spending the glasses will just allow you to flip it over so everyone can see it now make the game a little bit easier don't worry the game is plenty hard anyway and another item you can use not really an item it's kind of a separate thing these are the artifacts and when you have an artifact it stays here until you use it to use an artifact and there's some creatures or great old ones that require artifacts to defeat but usually artifacts are used to seal rifts you'll see each of the six locations that has these wall symbols has a little artifact symbol next to it in order to seal a rift at a location you must use the matching artifact on it so if you have this artifact in your inventory in your orange you can use this item and place it on the wall and now if there is a rift there it is now sealed because being if there is no rift there then you just lost the game but you don't know it until the very end so you have to look and find out where the rifts are before you seal them finally on your turn you can take an item you can take any of the items that are currently in your location now each location starts with three items and the one on the far left is always free there's no cost but some of the other ones usually have a cost associated with them so to take this item you'd have to give up one sanity to get this item you'd have to give up two this one allowed you'd have to draw an event card this one you'd have to move the necron marker and this one you'd have to add a creature to the board and these don't refill once you take an item the rest stay there and this space does not get refilled only when all three items are taken and removed do you then go into the bag and refill and fill up these three spaces and when the bag runs out then you take all the used tokens and discards and put them back in the bag another way you can make the game easier is to shift them down as you take them so if you take these glasses you could shift these down just that would make the game significantly easier again just just an option the game is extremely hard and don't feel bad about adding in some some variants some house rules to make the game a little easier at least for your first few games but of course eventually once you're familiar with the game you'll want to play it in its full painful glory so after all the players have done their actions done their turns then the last thing that happens in the round is you reveal an event so you flip over an event and the first thing you look at is in the top corner it shows the witch of salem and a number by an arrow and that's how many spaces clockwise around the board the witch of salem will move in this case four one two three four so for the next round the witch of salem will be here and you'll do the text that's the event and some of them are good some of them are bad so you'll do what the event says one thing that events can do is bring these other great old ones into play if they do they don't they're not as powerful as they would be if they were here they appear at the university as shadows so an event may tell you to bring the most recently revealed great old one and place it at the university each great old one has text in effect and when a shadow is at the university or when the great old one is revealed the text starts to take effect and it just makes the game even harder maybe the witch of salem doesn't do anything anymore for example one of them does that and this shadow works just like a creature if you go to this location you have to roll a die unless the witch of salem is there and you can defeat a shadow just like a creature except you would need three items and each one tells you what to do in this case dagon requires three different items that's why they have kind of three different colors here other ones have specific requirements or three identical ones and when it's defeated it just goes out of the game and then it's a new round a new round starts with the start player drawing another creature and placing it on the next available empty space clockwise from the witch of salem which would be here except this creature is already on the board and so instead of adding this to the board instead you do what the creature uh creature's negative effect is which in this case each player loses to sanity so each player would decrease their sanity by two and then this card gets discarded does not get added to the board and so you're going to keep going like this over most of the course of the game you're going to be collecting items and you're also going to be trying to look at these walls and if there are rifts placing artifacts on them to seal them but ultimately your goal is to use necronomicons to reveal all these great old ones until finally revealing this one and you must reveal this card before the necron marker reaches this corner if you don't you lose but assuming you're able to do that now this great old one is starting to i suppose rise from the depths and this text takes it takes effect apply the results from each lost die roll twice whenever you roll this dive if for example you have to lose sanity you lose two sanity instead of one that's a new rule that takes effect now the goal is to banish this old one before the necron marker reaches this space to do that one player has to have the three items shown on the top and to travel to this location the only way to travel to here because there's no card for the underwater prison instead you must use the secret passage so a player who has the necessary items goes the secret takes a secret passage obviously has to spend a sanity and goes to that location now assuming that they're they survived that trip now the there's a battle but it's kind of behind the scenes you're not actually actively fighting what's happening is now this creature's power is not applying so this negative effect which is uh which is normally in effect now that a player is here fighting the monster this no longer takes effect but now this player can't do anything when this player's turn comes around again they simply lose one sanity and if they go down to zero they're going to lose so how do you win well while a player is here with the necessary items another player must go to miskatonic university and use any artifact item to seal this rift assuming they're able to do that then the game is over and tentatively players have won except now you reveal all these tokens and every token that has a rift must have the matching artifact symbol having been placed on it over the course of the game and every wall cannot have any artifact on it if there's a rift without an artifact or or if there's a wall with an artifact it doesn't matter anything else that happened during the game you lose but again i would recommend for your first few plays just play that once a player uses glasses instead of peeking at the token instead just revealing it so that information is open to everybody don't worry the game is still plenty hard assuming that all the rifts are closed and no artifacts were used on walls which presumably would just open new rifts um and the great old one is defeated then you win the game and congratulations it is very difficult to win this game that's it you're ready to play witch of salem so a little bit of context this game came out in 2008 and 2008 was a big year for cooperative games if you look at the cooperative game genre especially in the hobbies we'd understand it today it kind of started in 2000 with the lord of the rings and then you kind of had one-offs here and there like lord of the rings was a well-respected game but it didn't necessarily start a genre it was almost some people saw it saw it as like a one-and-done kind of thing wow it's a cooperative game that's so unique but not as a genre just it's just it's kind of its own thing but then you'd have games like arkham horror second edition and shadows over camelot which came out in the in the mid 2000s and a couple of like i said just one-off cooperative games here and there and then in 2008 started the big explosion which has been continuing to this day there's still tons and tons of cooperative board games out there new ones coming out every year it seems 2008 saw which of salem but also saw ghost stories and pandemic and battlestar galactica whether you count that as a cooperative game it's it has a trappings of a cooperative game but it's actually a hidden secret team game anyway but you look at those cooperative games i mean pandemic itself is the most evergreen and has been the most i suppose the continuously most successful game and i would argue probably of the cooperative games that came out that year that one was the most influential for games to come later keep in mind that there weren't really a lot of rules by 2008 in terms of how to do a good cooperative game so a lot of designers went in some different directions right they were a lot of them were inspired by the cooperative games that came before but they had their own spin on it which of salem is very similar to ghost stories in one way and that it is extremely difficult it is a very very challenging cooperative board game um even just the like the rule book actually shows some some ways to make it harder but doesn't show any ways to make it easier and it should because even at the easiest difficulty setting it is extremely difficult and you'll you won't win very often in this game i would probably argue that it's easier with more players than fewer actually all my plays of which of salem have been two-player and i like it two-player but it is extremely difficult i would guess this is a guess because i haven't personally played it with more players bgg does say it's best with four at least that's the the consensus is with more players it would be a little bit easier um the number of monsters that come out every round scales for two three and four players but with four players there are more items in play and there's more sanity in play sanity being sort of your your health right when you run out of sanity you lose the game by default is extremely difficult but it is possible to make it easier because there's one kind of funny rule that a lot of people kind of complained about there are six locations not including miskatonic university there's six locations and at each location you put face down a token which will either be a rift something you have to close otherwise you lose the game or a blank wall and if you close a blank wall by accident i think you also lose so you have to check each of these tokens and the way to check is you use an item you use the glasses which is one of the items in the game you use the glasses you get to look at the flip side of the token to determine whether it's just a blank wall or if it's a rift according to the rules and in fact they actually embolden this this is important players are not allowed to share information as to which are rifts and which are not which makes the game even more challenging you can and we do especially in a two-player game we do do this we ignore that rule when you discard the glasses just flip the token face up for everyone to see it makes the game easier but don't worry it does not make the game too easy the game already has tons of challenge in this in this game so don't worry about making it too easy you just want to be able to scale it right you want to be able so that the first couple plays maybe it's a little bit easier it feels a little bit more possible and then once you get the hang of the game then you can play it at the normal difficulty level which normal is actually massively hard the reason that rule is in there about the hidden information you're not allowed to share is because otherwise there's no information hidden between players players don't have a hand of cards like they can have in lord of the rings or pandemic for example um all the information is out in the open available to all players at the same time there is hidden information but it's hidden to everybody at the same time right that means that without that rule with all that information about the the rifts the hidden rifts open to everybody at the same time so everything is open to all players at the same time it makes the game a little susceptible to what we call the alpha gamer problem and if you're not familiar with the alpha gamer problem it's something that happens in cooperative games or team games in which if you have let's say just imagine you're playing a cooperative game and you're it's a four-player game and one player is extremely familiar with the game the other three players maybe aren't so familiar with it but all the information is out in the open everybody can see everything so in an ideal situation of course everybody's communicating and discussing and coming up with strategies together as a team if one player is like very familiar with the game they have experience as to what works what doesn't it's very tempting for them to come out and say guys that's not going to work trust me we should do this instead and then it's a matter of how seriously do you take the game because if you want to win you generally want to do what the most experienced person says to do but what does that mean that means that it's basically just the experienced player who's playing the game right the experience player is okay we're going to do this and this and this and that's how we're going to ask how we're going to win oh you want to do that bad idea trust me we should do this instead and so the other players might feel like well what do you even need us for just play it by yourself you have the best chance of winning so this game is susceptible to that if you have hidden information open the the rift tokens i've never had that problem i guess i just must be blessed with playing with awesome people i've never experienced the alpha gamer problem personally and so it's not a problem for me and you need to make this game easier especially for your first few plays trust me just do it just have the rift information revealed to everyone all the same time and then just work together discuss as a team what to do where to go and don't worry the game will still be hard but at least you'll have more of a chance i'm really fascinated with this style of game and this is not something that's really important so much nowadays um because nowadays so many games have the mix of everything they have the interesting themes you have the the interesting mechanisms and it's all blended together it's all one big happy board gaming melting pot right but in the 2000s and definitely earlier it wasn't so much a melting pot there were definitely different styles of play i i'll get i'll get into stereotypes a little bit but this is what the kind of the general feeling was right is you had the german style and you had the american style now the american style games were usually about fun and interesting themes at least to a lot of geeks i suppose fantasy and science fiction themes were common but mechanisms it was more about the fun of the experience maybe there was a lot of dice rolling a lot of hooting and hollering a lot of cheers and groans the german style games on the other hand had to some people the improved aspect of having more interesting decisions to make more strategy i'm not this in american style games is a different style of game and to some people people preferred that so much so that back in the maybe like the mid 2000s american style games were viewed by a lot of people on board game geek as a as a negative as a bad thing right and that these all these german style games those were the good games right and then there was a bit of a push back on that so you had the revival of of what became to be called ameritrash and look there's obviously games that that cross that that artificial boundary right but i'm just saying the perceptions in the hobby at the time and of course now everything's a melting pot like i said but what was interesting and the reason i bring it up for this game is because this game came out 2008 which was before the melting pot really started to melt or maybe around that time it started to melt and i've always been interested in what are very obviously german style games but which generally have what what we would think of as american style themes right so this is definitely a german style game it has the mechanisms of a german style game it's it's thinky you have to plan ahead there are dice rolls but it's not really the focus it's more of the decisions you make right it's it kind of tickles the brain in a lot of good ways but the stereotype of german style games was they were about boring themes right they're about the italian renaissance or or trading in the mediterranean and for a lot of people that's that's kind of boring right so here is a combination right you have the german style design with a more even though it's based on a german book or book series it is actually what we would normally associate with an american style game right this game often got compared to arkham horror because it's the same theme it's a cooperative game in set in the lovecraftian universe where you're trying to banish a great old one and seal some rifts but they play very very differently right arkham horror is a big game it's a long game this game takes about an hour right it's not that long you know played in an evening play it after supper you know you play a game of this and then you can go off and you still have the rest of your night ahead of you right arkham horror that's you're full after that game you know it's not a big deal anymore but i just like to offer that context because this is a german style game that had a more traditionally american style theme of the the horror fantasy and those sorts of games have always fascinated me so i really like this game a lot but it is hard now it's important for me to to mention that it's hard hard hard hard like if you there's one takeaway here this game is hard and i usually don't like very difficult cooperative games i don't like ghost stories for example ghost stories is as hard or harder than this cooperative games have to thread and needle very delicately because you don't want the game to be too easy people will play it once they'll beat it and maybe they won't want to play it again i was like well i beat that game you know it's like a video game right once you beat it the motivation to play it again has dropped off a cliff right so you want the game to be hard so that you play and you lose but you want to play again and learn how to win so eventually you win but if the game is too hard that process takes too long i must have played ghost stories five times and never won a single time at some point you have to give up right some people say well you know with ghost stories you really need to play it you know yeah you'll lose the first three or four or five times but after that you really start to see the strategies it's like do i really have to play it three to five times five times before i know that i'll lose each time i don't want that can we just pretend that i played it five times and just say i lost now okay great now we can play something else the cooperative game should feel like it's possible to win and i never got that impression with ghost stories the game just beats you up all the time and feel like you make decisions and you're you're holding things but you're not making progress and just eventually the things are eating at you and eventually you're going to lose and hey if you like a game enough that you want to play it five six seven times knowing you're almost certainly going to lose but try and try and try all the power to you and if you like that style of game then yeah this is definitely that style as well this game is challenging i do feel like it feels a little bit more approachable it is extremely difficult you will almost certainly lose the first couple times but every time you play you start to see a little bit more of what things are important and what aren't right um you want to you want to have the items to defeat the monsters but you also want to use the items because you'll need to you'll need to use the glasses to look at the rifts you'll need to use the necronomicons in order to reveal the great old ones so there's a balancing act there you want to you want to hang on to the items in order to banish monsters and then use them to progress the game toward toward the conclusion the the process is fun the way you play you can improve with every play and um losing is fun and the game is hard but it feels like it should be hard you do get kind of a feeling of hopelessness in this game which i suppose is thematic the real question is when you lose did you still have fun and it's totally subjective i didn't find that with ghost stories when i lost ghost stories i felt like well why did i even play that game it seemed almost decided at the beginning that i was going to lose i don't get that feeling from witch of salem the game is hard and you will probably lose the first few times and sometimes you might feel like it's a little bit up to the luck as to whether you win or lose it is extremely frustrating to for example go to fight a monster and have all the items you need but when you encounter the monster you have to roll the die and the die might make you lose an item and if you lose an item then you can't defeat the monster after all right you can make the game easier again by making the item loss happen after you defeat the monster i haven't tried that personally it might make the game too easy but again for the first game or two you want it easy right you want to learn the ins and outs of how the game works and then as you learn what's important what's not important where you see opportunities where to take risks then you can ramp up the difficulty level and there's no shortage of difficulty in this this is a game for your long-term collection if you know what i mean it's a cooperative board game that's challenging so you won't really get bored of it you know like like my favorite as i said my favorite cooperative game is flashpoint right and there's i love flashpoint right out of the box but to add to it i i need expansions right of different maps different rules to kind of add to the experience because playing the same two boards is going to get boring after a while which of salem is definitely more in the it's going to be the same board every time but decisions you make every time are interesting and they might be different might be different priorities that come out so it's a lot of i wouldn't say there's a huge amount of variability in the box there is because there's the six great old ones and you'll get a different one possibly every time you play right but every game you play might on a surface level feel kind of similar but the variability comes in the decisions you make and so in that sense it's a really good kind of long-term prospect right you get the game you play it yeah you lose but you know you keep this in your collection you'll take it out again in a few months to a year and you'll play again and maybe you'll lose again but it's fun to try and over the course of the time that you own this game you will get better and better at the game and this game definitely benefits from repeat plays i don't know how hard it is it's a little bit hard to find now you getting a new copy would be very challenging you could probably find a used copy without it costing too too much i hope um yeah it's worthwhile if you come across it if you see it in an auction or you see it for trade and you like cooperative games and you like challenging cooperative games definitely check this game out this has been a board gym for me and my son uh we enjoy this as a two-player game and it's brutal at two players but it's good with all player counts really great cooperative game thanks for watching remember older games like witch of salem don't stop being good just because new games come out take care

Channel: Board Gems

Views: 463

Rating: 4.8518519 out of 5

Keywords: board games, card games, tabletop, ludica, Pizzeria Ludica, Board Gems, Kosmos, Michael Rieneck, Lovecraft

Id: ArzaZhgR2qc

Length: 45min 10sec (2710 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020