Spell-mary… bang! – review of the board game “The Book of Spells”

Instead of collecting cocoa, we collect matter

Spell Book is a simple game. Each player plays three phases in a row. In the first one, he draws two tokens from the bag or one from the display. In the second step, he can place one of the acquired markers on the familiar board, and in the third step, he can spend the acquired matter to learn a spell. Optionally, in each of these phases, instead of the basic action, we can also cast a spell if we have already mastered it.

In these few short sentences I have already presented the biggest mechanical problems. Saving matter markers is boring, especially in the first few turns. To develop a spell, we must have at least three of the same color, and preferably five (each spell can be mastered in three different ways, the more matter we spend, the better the effect will be). Sometimes it takes several turns to draw tokens from the bag to finally do something interesting! Furthermore, spell to spell is inconsistent. The strongest spells improve our first action, i.e. they make it easier to obtain matter tokens. This means that the person who learns these spells earlier will have much more fun. And others will be forced to save money and create spells that won’t be that useful.

Ultimately, the player who scores more points wins, and these are earned for spells developed as well as tokens collected on the familiar’s board. In other words, if you want to win, you have to be the best at conserving matter, which means you simply have to be very lucky!

Spectacular spells

The biggest and only advantage of the Spell Book is its replayability, which comes in three sets of spell cards. We always use only one set, or we can mix them as we like, although ultimately the table must have exactly seven cards in each of the seven suits. Some charms are quite spectacular because, for example, they allow you to strengthen other spells. Moreover, some spells also affect our teammates! However, it still comes down to tedious collecting of tokens of the same color or the same rune (three with the same symbol constitute a joker). By the way, these markers look quite nice, especially when placed on a large card decorated with nice graphics.

Is it worth creating spells?

The Book of Spells works and that’s really all I can say about this title. I love Phil Walker-Harding’s games, including Kakao , Sushi Go! or the Bear Park . Even after initial reluctance, I warmed to Cloud City . But The Book of Spells is a complete disappointment for me. The game works, but I don’t really want to come back to it because I’m bored with the constant drawing of tokens. I’m tired of turns in which I skip the last two phases because I was saving up those damn tokens for a meaningful spell. I didn’t particularly suffer while playing the game, because the gameplay is quite fast, but I expected something very good, even outstanding, from the title by Phil Walker-Harding. Unfortunately, at the moment The Book of Spells is the weakest of the games I have played this year.