Family fun to open the door – a review of Paolo Mori’s game “Via Magica”

I have certainly mentioned it already – I am more and more willing to choose lighter titles. Recently, I happened to sell one of the big games in full options, because at this point I don’t see any bigger chances of playing more than once from the big bell. In this case, we are dealing with a mechanically very simple game, and I will briefly tell you how I liked it below.

The beginnings

Holidays are behind us, so today there will be less of my outbursts, and more details. At this point, I usually try to write a few words about the author, referring to his previous games, but this time there is not much to mention. The game is a reskin of another production, set in Ancient Rome, which, however, I do not know, and I did not quickly find someone to play it. Clean slate.

Colorful fairs

In the box you will find:
– 96 cards (portals, prizes and help);
– 23 animus tokens;
– 48 crystals;
– a bag and instructions.

The graphic layer of the product caught my attention right away. I took a look at BoardGameGeek and knew I wanted to review it. The illustrations on the cards are beautiful, fabulous, very much to my taste. It is also difficult to fault the rest – the cards are large (this may make the t-shirt a bit more difficult), the chips are solid, the crystals are nice – everything is in the best order. The manual is also written in an understandable way and you only need to read it once in order not to have any major doubts during the game.

Bingo!

How is it played? At the beginning of the game, each participant receives 7 crystals and 6 cards, and chooses 3 of them. On these cards there are symbols corresponding to animus tokens in the bag. The game is played in turns – in each of them the first player takes one chip and places it on the table. If its symbol matches one of those on the cards, you may place one of your crystals on it; when all of them are covered, a spell is shouted out loud and the portal opens, triggering an effect – from scoring at the end of the game to permanent effects to use throughout the game. If a portal is opened, one of the ten cards on the table is drawn and replaced with the next one from the deck.

This sequence of events repeats until the joker is drawn, after which all the tokens are returned to the bag and passed to the next player.

The last thing worth mentioning are bonus cards, an additional way to earn points that is part of the race to collect card sets (though there is a lot of variety!). The game ends when at the end of the turn one of the players has 7 open doors (which of course can be easily changed by adjusting the game time, by default about 20-25 minutes).

Impressions?

I must admit that I did not like the first game – rather, I advise against the variant without initial card draft according to the instructions. The randomness made it practically nothing to do. And here we come to the biggest drawback – there are such moments. Of course, the whole point of the game is to prevent that from happening, but it can happen. Ecos has dealt with this problem very well (more about it in a moment). Implementing some kind of shield for an unlucky draw would certainly not hurt the game.

The second downside is the balance problems. I had the impression that not everything is right here, and by checking the forum thread, I was able to actually find that some cards with the same cost can differ significantly in the profit from their arrangement. To improve. However, when I spent some time with it, I started to like it – it is very simple, legible and looks nice on the table. There is a bit of combining here, but not enough to burn the contacts. I suspect that it fits very well as an introductory game to the hobby and as a title before trying Ecos : First Continent – a larger game, much more complex, but based on exactly the same mechanics (it is not in Polish yet, and it is linguistically dependent, but I am sure it’s only a matter of time because it’s great).