I played Wiz-War for the first time last night. Verdict: holy shit this game is fun. Fast-paced, full of reversals and unexpected fuckings-over, this is a fun, fun way to spend half an hour with your former friends.
Now, let’s get this straight, this game is no pissing contest - this is Wiz-War. This is a game where strength, ability, knowledge of the game, experience in wizardry, intelligence, wisdom, the height that you can piss up a wall, means nothing. ALL OF THEM mean NOTHING. This is Wiz-War, and in this game wizards live and die by the magic in their fingers.
Everyone gets five spells to choose from in the form of a hand of cards. It’s all your standard spell fare, some spell types (purple) counter others, some types (red) can only be cast once a turn, some (yellow) become items and some (green) you can cast as many of as you want.
The hand limit is seven, and at the end of your turn you can discard as many as you want before drawing up to the hand limit. As such you find yourself burning through cards very quickly. There are many cards that are only useful in very specific circumstances, and many cards that are much less powerful than others. By having the draw deck so big and varied (more on this later) the urge to get new cards, new spells, new combos is formidable, meaning players are even sometimes seen throwing away their entire hand because sometimes you’re dealt a hand of festering rubbish.
Whilst three of the spell types are constantly used throughout the game, there is one type that I found myself discarding every time I picked up a new one. The problem with the yellow item cards is that once played, they remain part of your hand, just placed face up on the table. This means to wield one of these items your hand limit is now one fewer. Since the temptation in the game is to constantly change up your spells, no one ever seemed to bother doing this, simply discarding them to get more useful ones for the next turn.
Some of these spells ARE very useful and some of them are very powerful. You can be a very good wizard by getting very lucky and churning out all these powerful cards one after another. The BEST wizards, however, the BEST wizards use the correct cards in the correct order. Some of these cards will make you face-palm and roll your eyes. Some of them might even contribute to the feeling that you are a contender for first place in the “Miss Terrible Hand” competition but then something will click and you’ll notice that if you play this terrible card AFTER these other two, it will become very good indeed.
Some of the cards do work very well together, and part of this comes from the way that the spell deck is arranged. All wizards draw their spell cards from one HUGE deck which is made of one small deck of essentials that goes in every time and three out of a possible six “flavoured” decks. All of these extra decks feel incredibly different on their own, so changing up even one deck in the huge stack of magic changes the flow of the game.
These possible six “flavoured” decks are:
Elemental - This is your basic fireballs and lightning bolts. Lots of damage, very confrontational, and lots of fun.
Conjuration - This is also a lot of fun, creative instead of destructive, allowing for traps, escapes and subterfuge.
Mentalism - Just as confrontational as Elemental, however it abandons the all-out damage approach in favour of what we like to call “Beard Magic”. Lots of complexity and clauses. Control and conquer.
Alchemy - This provides a lot more yellow item spells and as such our group never seemed to thrive with these cards. Using the suggested rule variation “Uncluttered Minds” (items don’t contribute to hand limit) would make this deck much more powerful.
Mutation - Similar to alchemy, except instead of items, this focuses on changing your wizard into a “creature” of sorts. This might make you quick, fierce or poisonous. Fun to play, but suffers from the same problems as Alchemy.
Thaumaturgy - This is an all-rounder, a bit of everything to add gaps that may be missing from other combinations.
These six decks combine in strange and interesting ways and a game with more confrontational decks (e.g. Elemental, Mentalism and Mutation) will lead to a completely different game than a deck with the other three. There are also more specific interactions between decks, one example being that Elemental throws a curveball to Alchemy. Any fire spells (mostly seen in Elemental) cast on a character instantly destroys any Alchemical stones they might be carrying.
What makes different games fun is that no matter whether the game is full of explosions or full of running away, it’s always interesting. The explosions are fun, but so is eating a wall in order to jump out of the way of an oncoming magical onslaught.
The one drawback of all this fun is that it’s all very unpredictable and almost impossible to plan. Some people thrive on this spontaneity, but other may despise it. It is, dare I say it, “magical” (sorry) when a plan comes together, combining three or more spells in one awesome combo. Unfortunately whether or not this happens is just as much up to luck as it is to planning. To some extent you can make your own luck by selectively discarding the less useful cards, but ultimately the deck ends up being so large that you can easily cycle through rounds and rounds of unusable garbage.
The ultimate bad news is that you can have a game in which you do nothing wrong tactically, socially or foresight-wise, and still end up losing. Horribly. Zero points at the end of the game or even worse, dead. And this is not fun.
Whether you find the mechanics fun or not, you’ll be equally torn with the design. Everything about it is over the top, sacrificing ease and smoothness of flow for extra richness in theme. In one part look at all these tokens.
These are a hassle to sort through and keep track of. But then look at this.
My wizard just blew a hole in this wall and now there is no wall. And the token for that is perfect in not only summing up that you may now run through this gap, but also that it was exploded apart.
And for me, the tokens best summarise this game. Fun but clunky. The game takes an age to set up and pack down in comparison to the sometimes incredibly short game time. Whilst this is easy to admit, it is also easy to admit that when we have played this game we’ve never played it just once. Simply the amount of stuff in the game makes you want to play it again, partly because there’s just so much to experience (you’ll never use all the tokens in one game, ever) but partly because there’s so much stuff you have to pack away at the end. That was fun; we might as well play again. This time with a different deck!
Buy Wiz-War if:
You like games where each play through is so drastically different that you can have no idea what’s going to happen at any point. Not even on your own turn. It is chaotic. It is unpredictable. It is magic. It is Wiz-War.
- Mike Wood
NEW PODCAST!
4VP - S01E03 - Chairman of the Board
Gaming discussion show with Chris MacLennan, Richard Sims and Mike Wood. In this episode the team take a look at two classic games, Wiz-War and Cosmic Encounter, both of which have been reprinted by FFG in a fancy, modern format. We also discuss Richard Borg's beloved light wargame Memoir 44. In video games we look at indie, roguelike space combat simulator FTL and the highly anticipated steampunk stealth 'em up Dishonored.
This is not exactly a video game trailer but hey, the site is called gamesvideos right? So here's the trailer of Wiz-War the new board game by Fantasy Flight Games which is now on sale!
