Evenfall was one of the games I was most looking forward to picking up at Essen Spiel last year. So many of my boxes were ticked:

• Card game
• Fantasy setting
• Beautiful art
• Tableau/engine building
• Asymmetrical player powers

In Evenfall players lead a coven of witches. Send them out to discover new places of power to add to your domain (tableau), perform rituals in those places to get an immediate bonus or an additional action spot your witches can visit; recruit specialists that will give you access to powerful abilities or end game scoring conditions just for you – the choice of how to use these specialists is up to you!
The main mechanisms of this game are tableau building, worker placement and area majority. Your workers come in two types: (regular) witches and elder witches. Both are represented by adorable meeples with funny hats. Each of the two classes of witches has their own job description, you will not be able to use just any witch for any task. An important task of your regular witches is to represent you in the different regions of the magical realm you play in. At the end of each of the three rounds, a battle will take place to see who is worthy of claiming one of the powerstones of each region. These powerstones are oval tokens their owner can use to double the scoring of a ritual card in their tableau at the end of the game.

Locations, specialists and rituals

Connected to the region boards (3 in a game with 3 and 4 players, 2 in a solo or 2-player game) are location cards. These cards are important as they are the foundation you need for your ritual cards. Each ritual card must be attached to a location card, so the more rituals you want to perform, the more location cards you need to add to your tableau. By sending witches to the region board, you can take one of the location cards linked to that region board. Each location card requires one or two witches to be sent to the region. You only have 4 regular witches… the 4 elder witches have more important things to do than scouting and can’t be used for this action… unless you were to have a specialist, player or ritual power that would permit it. You start the game with one location card and will add more to your tableau as the game progresses. Your tableau (or domain) consists of two circles: the outer circle (top row) and the inner circle (bottom row). Adding ritual cards to the locations is a big part of the game, but it doesn’t end there. In order to score you vp at the end of the game, these ritual cards and the locations they are attached to must be in your inner circle, whatever is left in your outer circle will not give you points… Moving cards from your outer to your inner circle is done with an action you can find on cards, on region boards or as a reward for moving up your coven track.

For playing all these cards, and often to activate abilities of specialists or rituals, you need resources, so that’s another part of your engine you need to manage. One way to get your hands on resources is to harvest the locations in your outer circle: most locations have a yield of some resources, you can collect all of them when you harvest, but you can only harvest once each round.

Mana is a special resource you will mainly use in the battle phase. Remember how at the end of each round the witches on the different location boards will battle in order to determine which clan can claim one of the powerstones? You can only participate in a battle when you have at least one witch present on that region board (either from taking a location card, or from activating an action spot on that region board). Each witch present gives one battle strength to their clan. Players can increase that number by secretly assigning (and then revealing simultaneously) any amount of mana (well, up to what they have available) for one strength each. Mana you assign is spent, even when you didn’t assign enough to win the battle. The winner of the battle will get to take one powerstone from the region board. Every player, including the winner, can then take the rewards for the battle strength they invested in the battle – there are rewards for 4, 6 and 8 strength and you get to take the rewards of all the levels you have reached or surpassed! Rewards include vp, extra cards, moving a location (and ritual) from your outer circle to your inner circle, etc. Even if you have no chance of winning a battle, these rewards are a great way to have all players involved in a battle.

Strategic Depth: The first time I played this (2-player game) we used the easy variant (no asymmetry) and to be honest I was a tiny bit disappointed as the game felt a bit lighter than I had hoped. Playing with the asymmetrical player powers really opened up the game for me as it offered so many more strategic options. A player power often focuses on one aspect of the game, so in a way it will guide your strategy as it is just too tempting to not try to further exploit that particular aspect. At the same time, this can have some weird overpowered side effects when one player gets very lucky in drawing cards that will further strengthen their player power… I have heard from friends who played this for the first time and had one player with crazy luck running away with the game – crushing all the fun for the other players who felt a bit frustrated by that… This will not happen every time and it will not bother every player as much, but be aware that it can happen. It also happened in my last game where I played as The Spike clan against The Circle clan. My player power let me put powerstones on my player board for juicy bonuses – so I figured I needed to get a strong mana engine asap in order to win every battle, so I could get my hands on as much powerstones as possible. It ended up feeling like the worst match-up possible – my opponent had a very powerful mana engine that let him easily win every battle, claim the powerstone and leave me hanging out to dry. I did manage to get some cards and specialists that would give me small amounts of mana for just about everything I did, but it was peanuts compared to my opponent’s mana pool. I felt like David facing Goliath every time I stepped into the battle arena in each region… and I had left my sling at home. I felt dead in the water. Even(fall) so, I still enjoyed my play as I did feel I had built a decent little engine with some cool abilities and rewards. And the way battles work still make it worth your time and strength and mana, as you will get to claim other rewards, even if you didn’t get to take a powerstone. That is a clever way to incentivize every player to participate in the battle, as those rewards are often too good to just ignore.

Theme: I love the theme. Witches are hot at the moment as there are quite a few games that came out recently with a witchcraft theme. I also love the art in Evenfall. While the cards look dark and ominous, the region boards and location cards have a warm and bright color palette as a counterbalance. The components are of really good quality. I especially love the screenprinted witch meeples. Even if they are capable of wielding tremendous power, they look adorable.

Ease of learning/teaching:  The game comes with a very well laid out rulebook, with examples to clarify every action you can take. If your group is familiar with worker placement and tableau building games, teaching this will be a breeze. The player aids have all the info you need.

Player interaction: There is no direct or negative interaction. Some cards do trigger when an opponent performs a specific action and will then offer their owner some resource or mana, while other cards offer their owner powerful abilities but at the same time give the opponents a little something. For instance: a ritual card lets you convert 3 books (resource) into 5 vp, but it also gives your opponents one book each time you would activate that ability. You will ‘battle’ for the regions, but even then there is no negative interaction, it is more of a mind game, and even when you lose, you still get decent rewards just for participating in the battle.

Happiness: I had super high expectations for this game, and you know how that often turns out: the game might not live up to those… Evenfall grew on me. While my first play felt like a bit of a letdown, the game won some extra points when played with the asymmetrical player boards. It is a game where you will be looking for card synergies, or ways to further exploit your special player power if you play with these: specialists and rituals that work well with your player power, rituals or locations that will give you the resources you need to activate other cards. It is about squeezing as much as your can out of every round, with every witch meeple, every card, every resource, every action at your disposal. You will start the game feeling like there isn’t a lot you can accomplish, but then that snowball starts growing and rolling, faster and faster and all of a sudden you are looking at every card, your player power, every witch and try to figure out the most efficient way to use them together.
I love how fast this plays. If all players are familiar with the game you won’t need much more than an hour to play. While there are only three rounds played, there is a strong snowball effect. Three rounds isn’t much, but when the last round starts you will have so many more options to choose from that it will feel a lot more rewarding and tense than the first round. That said, with only 3 rounds there isn’t a lot of room for error: make sure to get your engine up asap as you don’t have that many chances to activate it. If you can handle a bit of luck of the draw (especially when you feel your opponent has better luck than you), it is well worth a try!