Quo Vadis was a 1992 game about ‘politics and intrigue in ancient Rome’, and boy. Does it look like a game from 1992. A flat marble texture on the front, faded stock image of people in white robes, and a graphic design that looks like it was created directly in Microsoft Excel.
Thankfully, in 2023 Bitewing Games crowdfunded a reimplementation, Zoo Vadis, ‘politics and intrigue in the animal kingdom’. And I’ll be honest, I never really gave this game a second look. Even knowing the designer was Reiner Knizia, I just am not interested in heavy negotiation games. Any game that features wheeling and dealing, or swindling, or even just loose trading rules don’t interest me. I hate the idea that my game can be hamstrung by someone else’s pure refusal to barter with me. I so much prefer games where the actions and consequences are clear and well-defined.
And yet, I’m smitten. In Zoo Vadis, players control an animal faction as they slowly move from the bottom of their zoo cages to the very top. The only way to move along these paths, however, is with the blessing of the pen that you’re currently in. Each pen has a number of spaces, and in order to move ahead, you need votes equal to the majority of your pen. So if your pen has 5 available spaces, you’d need 3 votes to move your animal out of that pen. If you control 3 of the animals in that pen, then it’s easy. You give yourself the thumbs up and move along peacefully.
But that’s very unlikely to happen. Instead, you’ll need to broker deals with those in your cage. The rules for this exchange are wonderfully loose, but also, non-binding. You promise favours, create mutually beneficial situations, and set the price for every single vote, but anything that cannot be transacted on this specific turn, becomes non-binding. If you agree on 2 votes for movement right now, there’s no taking that back. But if you promise to give someone votes later, there’s nothing holding you to that promise (other than the shame of being untrustworthy, of course).
Between each pen are victory point tokens, and the animal who moves along the path gets to scoop up that token. The animals who did give you a vote also get one point from the bank, presumably it’s the karmic benefit of being an aggregable party.
Each player also has their own special faction ability, but there’s quite a twist. In Zoo Vadis, you may never use your own player power. Instead, it’s a bargaining chip for you to dole out to your opponents. A rule-breaking, potentially game swinging feather in your cap. It’s a wonderful twist on the system, giving players somewhat intangible benefits to trade with instead of only the victory points and positioning.
All this is wrapped together in a beautiful package, with amazing art by the talented Kwanchai Moriya and thick, sturdy ani-meeples. It’s an attractive game, with rules that are simple enough to be taught quickly in the midst of a crowded convention hall. Which is perfect because Zoo Vadis shines at the higher player counts.
The goal of the game is to amass the most victory points. But if you yourself don’t manage to get one of your meeples into the pen at the top of the board, you are ineligible for victory. It may be tempting to fill up the bottom of the board with all of your meeples so you can influence every movement, but neglecting to move yourself will spell disaster. Conversely, greedily rushing up the board may get you into the prize pen, but you’ll have a lot less influence among the bottom of the board.
Now, because you can’t always rely on your fellow players to play nicely, there’s a neutral party in play. The peacocks. They sit on spots, and you either pay them 2 points for a vote, or, chose to move them up the tracks, taking up precious spots further up the chain.
Zoo Vadis ends when the prize pen is full. And there’s a delicious ramp up to the end of the game. After the first two or three meeples make their way into the pen, new players won’t feel the jaws of defeat closing in on them. Little do they know that it’s not uncommon for three or more players to rush those neutral peacocks into position, and then use special powers to suddenly fill up the final slots, bringing Zoo Vadis to a sudden conclusion.
I can only speculate, but I have to assume that Zoo Vadis will play differently with different groups. If someone is being a jerk, then players will leave the game with bad feelings. If someone just refuses to participate, again, the experience will suffer. I don’t think the onus is on the game to facilitate a good experience, but it’s something to be aware of. If you have a group of friendly, but loudmouthed people who like to haggle, then Zoo Vadis is a pretty special experience.
Unlike most modern euro games, Zoo Vadis is pure player interaction. Nothing really happens unless other players allow it, and if someone is doing something the whole group wants to prevent, then there are plenty of ways to stymie their progress. You can negotiate with multiple parties at the same time, make promises for future favours, and trade those favours away. The player powers don’t necessarily feel balanced, but because everything is up for negotiation, Zoo Vadis is almost self-balancing. Some powers are obviously attractive and sought after, while others will require that players sell the possibilities to the others.
It’s almost a crime, how good Zoo Vadis is, compared to how simple the rules are. There’s not much more than a board and victory point chits, and yet, Zoo Vadis has left a strong impression on me. Zoo Vadis hasn’t converted me into a negotiation gamer, but it has convinced me that, in the right hands, negotiation can be brilliant. I feel like Zoo Vadis is the exception, not the rule when it comes to negotiation games, but I will say that I am happy to have finally found a negotiation game that elicits joy in my heart.
A copy of Mountain Goats and The Big Mountain expansion was provided by AllPlay for review purposes.
The last time I talked about Mountain Goats, I framed it in comparison to Can’t Stop. On the surface that comparison makes sense, both games involve rolling four dice and moving pieces up numbered tracks. But the more I’ve played Mountain Goats, the more I’ve come to realize how much of a disservice that framing actually does to it. The similarities are superficial. Underneath, they’re trying to create very different experiences.
Can’t Stop is one of the purest push-your-luck games ever designed. The entire experience revolves around that moment where you ask yourself if you should roll the dice one more time, knowing full well you might bust and lose all the progress you’ve made. The tension comes from risk and greed. Mountain Goats, on the other hand, isn’t really about that kind of gamble at all. If I had to place it in a category, it feels much closer to a light area control game. Yes, you still roll four dice every turn, but the way you use those dice is far more flexible. If you roll a four and a five, you can combine them to climb the ten track twice, or push the five track four times, or split them up and advance on both. There’s none of the rigid pairing that defines Can’t Stop, and because of that freedom you’re rarely stuck without options.
That flexibility means you’re almost never losing entire turns. Sure, sometimes the dice won’t cooperate. Like, you might be desperate for a nine and just can’t seem to roll the right combination, but there’s almost always something productive you can do with what you’ve rolled. The game itself is made up of six numbered tracks, and each player is trying to climb those tracks with their goats. For most of the climb nothing particularly dramatic happens. As long as you’re somewhere along the track and not sitting at the summit, you aren’t earning points, but you’re also completely safe. No one can block your movement, knock you down, or interfere with your progress in any way.
That is, until you reach the top.
Once your goat hits the summit of a track, that position starts generating points for you every time you commit dice to that number, and will keep doing so for as long Mas you remain there. The catch, of course, is that the summit of each track only has room for one goat. The next player who manages to climb to the top immediately knocks your goat all the way back down to the bottom. That’s where the real tension in Mountain Goats lives: sitting comfortably at the top of the mountain, collecting points while watching the other players inch closer to you from below with daggers held between their teeth.
Those moments can get surprisingly dramatic. It can feel quite tense, sitting at the summit when only one or two points remain in the stack, while two opponents are parked on the space just below you. Every roll of the dice, both yours and your opponents, has small prayer whispered that they don’t hit the number they need. When they miss the roll, and you manage to drain the last points from the pile before they can take your place, it feels fantastic. It’s not a huge, bombastic victory, you won’t be jumping out of your chair and shout your victory, but you surely will exhale out your nose, smugly satisfied that your gambit paid off.
There are also bonus points available for players who manage to reach the summit of every single track at least once. Completing that full set awards a nice chunk of points, though in practice I’ve often found it more efficient to focus on one track and squeeze as much value out of it as possible. Spreading yourself across the board means investing multiple actions just to climb into position, and sometimes that effort feels like it could have been better spent reinforcing a single scoring engine.
The Big Mountain expansion introduces another wrinkle to the decision-making. It adds a separate mountain track off to the side with spaces numbered from eleven to twenty-four. Whenever you want, you can commit one of your goats to that mountain by climbing onto one of those spaces, but doing so requires combining dice in larger values to reach those numbers. At the end of the game, the player who sits the highest on that mountain earns a sizeable point bonus.
There’s an important catch, though: you don’t get extra goats for this track. If you want to send one to the Big Mountain, you have to remove it from the main game. This is supposed to create an interesting little risk-reward moment. Maybe you’d rather sacrifice the chance to keep scoring on a regular track in order to secure those endgame points. In theory, it sets up a tug-of-war between short-term scoring options and long-term positioning.
In practice, what often happens is the big mountain lays empty until one or two of the point piles on the main board run out entirely, those goats naturally migrate over to the Big Mountain because they no longer have anywhere else to score. Part of me wishes there were a rule preventing goats from leaving the summit for the big mountain once they’ve reached it, just to create a stronger push-and-pull between staying put for points and abandoning that position for the endgame race. Still, even without that tension dialled up, the expansion fits so nicely into the base game.
The Big Mountain is the kind of expansion I immediately folded into the base game and haven’t looked back since. It adds very little rules overhead but solves a niggling little pain points that I had with the base game. Like, What are you supposed to do when one of the tracks runs out of points, what happens when your dice rolls don’t line up with the available tracks, especially if you roll four 6’s. The Big Mountain gives those scenarios a natural outlet, and because of that it feels a lot less like an add-on, and more like something that has been there all along.
One small surprise about Mountain Goats is the physical footprint it creates on the table. The box itself is tiny, a small square only slightly thicker than most card game boxes, but much smaller in length and width. You might reasonably assume that means the game itself would be similarly compact, but you’d be mistaken! Once you lay out the twenty cards that form the mountain tracks, the game demands more table space than its box would suggest. It’s not quite the portable pub or airplane game that the packaging might imply. This isn’t really a complaint so much as an observation. It’s a small box that stores everything neatly, and respects my limited shelf space, and then sprawls into a surprisingly large play area once the game begins. My expectations were simply shaped by other small-box games that tend to stay small once they hit the table.
Even with that slightly larger than expected footprint, it’s hard to not fall in love with Mountain Goats. The whole game takes between 20 and 30 minutes, serves some emotional highs and lows, the art direction is bright and playful, and the rules are easy enough to teach in just a few minutes. It’s light without feeling trivial. For such a small package, it manages to create a lot of memorable little moments, like the time you managed to drain the 6 pile before anyone could kick you off the track, locking them all out of the set bonuses for the entire game. I suspect my partner wanted to literally push me off the mountain after that game!
Let me start by saying that I adore the theme of Rebel Princess.
Classic fairy-tale princesses have generally always been trapped in a fairly grim narrative box. No matter how brave, clever, or capable they are, their ultimate “win condition” tends to be the same: get married. Roll credits. Rebel Princess turns that expectation on its head. In this game, the princesses have decided they’re done with proposals, done with princes, and absolutely not interested in settling down just because the story says they should.
What makes this theming so interesting is that it’s not just a coat of paint. The theme of Rebel Princess is built around rejecting marriage, and that idea feeds directly into the trick-taking gameplay in a way that feels intuitive. I absolutely love it when a theme informs gameplay.
Rebel Princess is a trick-taking game inspired by Hearts. If you’ve played Hearts, you’ll already understand most of the game, which is to avoid taking certain cards, because those cards will give you points. And points are bad. In Rebel Princess, those points take the form of proposals. Each prince card represents a proposal, and the goal of the game is very simple: avoid proposals at all costs.
The deck is divided into four suits, numbered one through ten. One of those suits is the Prince suit, and that’s where the trouble lies. Each prince offers exactly one proposal to the player who takes the trick containing that card. Take a prince, take a proposal. The player with the least proposals wins the game. Also, just for a bit of an added twist, the green 8 is the Frog Prince, who is worth 5 proposals when he’s won.
So far, so familiar. But Rebel Princess is so much more than a straight retheme of Hearts. It layers on a couple of systems that dramatically reshape how the game feels.
The first and most important addition is player powers. Each player takes a princess tile at the start of the game. Each of these princesses are classic literature (or if you’re a millennial like me, from the Disney movies of our childhoods). Cinderella, Pocahontas, Mulan, and many more. Each princess comes with a unique ability that modifies how you can play the game. Some let you break suit rules, some let you manipulate tricks after they’re played, and others invert the hierarchy of numbers for a specific hand.
These powers do a fantastic job of pushing Rebel Princess beyond a purely reactive trick-taking experience. You’re no longer just counting cards and tracking suits, you’re actively planning around when to use your power, who it might hurt, and how it will interact with the rest of the table. I had one game where I successfully baited out the prince of frogs, only to swap the card I played for a much lower one, sticking that player with a nasty 5 proposals. Bam, gottem.
That being said, this is also where one of my small hesitations lives. The princess powers don’t all feel equally impactful. In my plays, some princesses use their abilities maybe once or twice per game, saving them for some dramatic moments. Potentially, other princesses can forget what your power is, because you’ve gone 3 rounds without using it. Others seem to fire almost every single round. That imbalance doesn’t break the game, but it’s noticeable, especially once players become familiar with the full roster. I suspect experienced groups will gravitate toward certain princesses more than others.
The second major addition to Rebel Princess are the round cards.
At the start of each round, a round card introduces a new rule that changes how the entire hand will play out. Often this begins with a card-passing phase: pass one to three cards to your left or right. Already, that small change can dramatically reshape your hand and your plans.
Then comes the twist. Maybe this round if you manage to take no tricks at all, you immediately take five proposals. Now you HAVE to win at least one, right? Another round card could be something like, every three card you capture this round is worth negative three proposals, suddenly turning low cards into high-value targets. These rules force you to re-evaluate what “good” play even looks like from round to round.
Together, the princess powers and round cards make Rebel Princess far more dynamic than a standard trick-taking game. You probably won’t fall into a single dominant strategy. What worked last round might be actively dangerous in the next. That constant change is what makes the game feel fresh even after repeated plays.
If you’ve played a lot of classic trick-taking games, Rebel Princess turns so many of the genre’s stables on it’s head. High cards are dangerous. Winning tricks is often bad. Suddenly, you’ll find yourself desperately trying slough off your highest cards and clinging to low numbers so you can dodge those pesky suitors entirely.
There are few feelings in trick-taking more satisfying than surprising your opponents. Those moments when someone thinks they’re going to get away scott-free, only for you to stick them with 3 princes, or even better, when you suddenly play off-suit and drop that 5 proposal frog prince right into someone’s lap.
The most dramatic moment of all though, is shooting the moon.
If you manage to take every single prince and the Frog Prince, you flip the script entirely and score negative ten proposals. Pulling this off feels incredible. And the tension, as you take prince after prince, the table growing the realization that you just might pull it off, and they’re powerless to stop you…
It’s one of those moments that players will remember long after the game ends.
I’ve never played the original Hearts, but I have played a lot of trick-taking games over the years, and Rebel Princess comfortably sits among the better modern entries in the genre.
The production helps, too. The card art is charming and expressive. While every card doesn’t have unique art, each suit has its own full-card illustration, which is lovely enough. The princesses tiles themselves are full of that rogueish personality that gives the game it’s name.
With a large roster of 12 princesses and 26 round cards, Rebel Princess has a lot of variability baked in. Mixing that with the natural replayability of trick taking games, you’ll be exploring new combinations of powers and rules often.
In the end, Rebel Princess is a smart, satisfying twist on a classic formula. It’s approachable for players familiar with Hearts, but deep enough to reward repeated plays. It manages to be playful, mean, thematic, and tactical all at once. That’s not an easy balance to strike.
I give Rebel Princess a full recommendation. If you enjoy trick-taking games and are looking for one that both respects tradition and gleefully rebels against it, Rebel Princess is well worth your time.
Disclaimer: A copy of Perch was provided by Inside Up Games for review
Hey, do you want to play that bird game? No, not Wingspan, the other one! The area control game! No, not Root, the one with just birds!
Right off the bat, the cover art of Perch sets a tone. At first glance, it looks like it will be a peaceful game. A twilight scene featuring a menagerie of birds milling about on branches amongst the green shrubs. But looking closer, you’ll notice that all these birds have angry eyebrows. There are more birds than branches, and control of those branches is the only thing that really matters to them. They’re willing to claw and peck their way to control here.
Perch is an area control game for 2 to 5 players, designed by Douglas Hettrick, with art by Ari Oliver, and published by Inside Up games in 2025. Perch casts players as a colour of bird and tasks them with earning the most points possible over 5 rounds. Each round players will take two birds of their colour, and pull two more birds out from a bag as their options for the round. Then, turn by turn, players will place one of the birds they control onto the various tiles on the table. Once everyone is done placing their birds, each tile is evaluated for majority. Whoever has the most birds on a tile will earn the top billing of points, but there’s a small catch. Players who have tied amounts of birds will cancel each other out, denying each other from scoring any points at all.
In addition to placing your birds, if you happen to have control of an animal, you can activate an animal you control once per round. The timing of animal activation can be critical, as a late activation gives players precious little time to react to your moves. But you can only do one free action per turn, meaning if you control multiple animals you’ll need to figure out which one you want to use and when. The animal element adds layers to the territory control aspect, as most of them will allow you to move, remove, or even swap anyone’s birds between tiles, something that is impossible to do without the aid of an animal companion. That being said, the animals themselves aren’t worth very many points, so you need to ensure you use their powers effectively if you want to claim dominance.
That’s the core of Perch, slowly spreading out your flock to capture points and manipulate the table state to deny your opponents points. Beyond points, most of the tiles in the game also offer some benefit or twist. Some will give you control of an animal, which you can use as a free action in the next round to cause just a little bit of chaos by moving some birds, while other tiles will allow you to put extra birds into the migration bag, or will modify the first player position. Things of that nature.
There’s a lot of variability in the tiles themselves, with 24 tiles included in the game and only 8 to 13 being used per game (depending on player count), each game of Perch will feel different. Whether it’s because of the specific mix of animals available, or even just the fact that having specific tiles next to each other may influence some of the decisions you make on a game to game basis (like how the animals move). Further influencing your decisions is a secret end of game objective card that may tip the scales one way or another when you’re placing your birds.
On the subject of player count, I was initially dismayed when I saw the two player mode of the game included a neutral third player, which the rulebook deems a “Bird-brained player”. What this actually amounts to is a third colour going into the bag, which may work its way into both players hands, to be used by both to deny each other the sweet, sweet majorites.
Perch is not a strategic game, not really. So much of Perch is reacting to what the other players have done, because the other players presence in each of the tiles is so wildly important. Each round you’re only guaranteed two of your own birds to place, but just because draw other players birds out of the bag, doesn’t mean you have less control. Absolutely not, as I said before, the real dynamism of Perch’s system is the fact that ties are so punishingly cruel. If two players are just one bird off from each other on a juicy 6 point tile, you could be holding the difference between their victory and defeat. Sometimes, you plopping an extra bird onto your opponents stack gives them a majority on a tile where being 2nd is the most points, or perhaps you bump them up into a tied position, denying two opponents points.
Perhaps it should go without saying, that they could be holding your fate in their hands, also. While I do think it’s generally more advantageous to have more birds out on the field, a clever player will be able to gerrymander their way to victory. While I enjoyed the freedom of having control over other players birds and using their own tokens against them, or having the ability to use my birdhouse on my opponents to lock down one of their sacks, I couldn’t help but feel frustrated when I pulled two of my opponents birds, and my opponent pulled two of their own birds too. 6 of their birds to 2 of mine in one rounds felt like a violent swing. That’s only really present in the 2 player game though, at higher player counts there’s usually the same number of birds going into the bag than are coming out.
The system of tied players cancelling each other out reminds me a lot of Las Vegas by Rüdiger Dorn. But what Perch lacks in comparison to Las Vegas is the levity introduced by the push-your-luck randomness of rolling a fistful of dice. Perch instead revels in its deterministic cruelty. There is no randomness in Perch, everything you can do right in the open. This means there won’t be any surprise backstab moments. You’ll watch as your opponents push their knife into your plans, and you’re powerless to stop it.
The first two rounds in Perch feel inconsequential. You’ll plop out the 4 birds that have been allocated to you, not really being able to control or effect the game state too drastically. But by the time the 3rd round hits, suddenly everything is contested. Strongholds have been established, and dramatic upsets are starting to take place. The animals have been deployed, shaking up the stability of the flock. Every tile at the end of the game balances on a knifes edge, as you have many options to affect everything, but so do your opponents. It’s deterministic, making it hard to really surprise people. Instead, it’s more of a game of forking your opponents. Putting everyone into a disadvantageous position, no matter what they choose. It’s gratifying watching someone give up one battlefield to concentrate their energies somewhere else.
I think my favourite rule in Perch is that the player with the least amount of points each round is the last player in the next round. In curling terms, this is called ‘having the hammer’. The last player to make a move means no one will be able to undercut or thwart their plans. This is a pleasant bit of power that allows the player in last place catch up, even if just a little bit. But if someone had a commanding lead over the highest scoring tile, it can be nearly impossible to catch them, considering you’re only guaranteed 2 of your own birds each round. But when you do manage to orchestrate an upset, oh boy is it ever satisfying.
If you’re already a fan of area majority games like El Grande, there’s a lot to love in Perch. It offers new twists and some exciting variability to the gameplay. I appreciate that it only takes 10 minutes to teach, and plays about an hour. Also, the production is pretty great too. The insert has a removable well for the birds to live in, the birds themselves stack so you can easily see who is winning on each tile, and the non-bird animals are acrylic standees, each one featuring their own lovely artwork.
Perch is a game of sharp elbows hidden by soft feathers. It’s artwork and presentation creates a deceptively calm table presence, but its gameplay reveals constant, low-grade tension as every placement threatens every other player at the table. It thrives not on long-term planning, but on reading the table, seizing small opportunities, and knowing exactly when to ruin someone else’s perfect setup. It won’t scratch the itch for players looking for deep strategic arcs or satisfy players who delight in executing carefully laid plans, but for those who enjoy reactive, tactical games, Perch is a compelling game. By the end, the branches are crowded, the margins are razor-thin, and every point feels contested and well-earned.
That’s probably how the seagulls feel when they steal my french fries, now that I think about it.
The expansion to Perch, Perch: Birds of Play is on Kickstarter now
Once upon a time, I was learning about the difference between lived experiences and observed experiences. The teacher split the class in half. One group sat back and recorded what they saw, while the other group had to run up a staircase, breathing only through a straw. Then the class switched roles.
Unsurprisingly, the observers didn’t quite grasp how difficult the task really was until they experienced it themselves. And that lesson came back to me when I sat down to play Tearable Quest, designed by Shintaro Ono, with art by Sai Beppu, and published by Allplay in 2025.
Because on the surface, Tearable Quest looks like nothing. You get a sheet of paper absolutely littered with icons like swords, spells, slimes, goblins, bows, and so on. Your job is to rip out only the icons you need to score points. Each round introduces a different monster with specific scoring requirements, alongside a boss card that’s always available to be tackled, tied to its own icons. Over three two minute rounds, you’re trying to earn the most points by carefully tearing out exactly what you need to match those recipes.
And I do mean exactly.
You can’t have extra icons present in your piece. You can’t have half an icon. It has to be a clean, precise tear of only what’s required. Which sounds easy until you actually try it. The timer starts, you identify what the recipe is, then look down at the sheet. The paper is cluttered, the icons you want are never conveniently grouped together, so you end up carving these awkward zig-zag paths through the paper, trying to isolate just the right pieces without ruining everything around them. To make matters worse, if you flip the sheet over you’ll find treasures that boost your score and curses that bring it back down, adding another layer of consideration to every rip.
Now, Tearable Quest is not just about precision, it’s about speed. You’ll be halfway through a tear, trying to grab one more icon for maximum points, and suddenly you realize there are only a few seconds left. Do you commit to your rip and risk everything, or do you play it safe and just lock in what you have? That tension, that split-second decision-making, is where my heart started to flutter and a smile crossed my face.
And all of this ripping and tearing is happening on a single sheet of paper that has to last you all three rounds. If you go too hard too early, you’ll massacre your page, and you might not have anything usable left in the later rounds. But if you’re too cautious, you fall behind. It creates this surprisingly compelling push and pull between greed and restraint that I wasn’t expecting at all.
That’s where the lived experience hits. From the outside, Tearable Quest looks like a throwaway gimmick. Ripping paper as a game mechanic sounds more like a novelty than something you’d actually want to play. But once you’re in it and the clock is ticking and your hands fumble as you try to make clean, efficient tears, you start to notice how awkwardly fun the game is. You’ll curse how big your thumbs feel. How unpredictable ripping paper can be. How badly you want just one more icon before that timer runs out. You’ll feel jubilant that you managed to complete your rip before the timer runs out, but you’ll flip the paper over and find 2 curses, rendering your score nil. Oh, the hubris…
The art plays a big role in selling the experience. Sai Beppu’s illustrations are bright, cartoonish, and disarming in a way that makes the whole thing feel playful rather than ridiculous. You’re still an adult sitting there gleefully ripping up paper, but the game leans into that energy instead of fighting it, and it works wonderfully.
There isn’t a huge amount of variety here. There are two different sheets to play with, four different monsters (you’ll use 3 during each game), and half a dozen bosses. There are some bonus cards to mix things up, but the core experience doesn’t really change. You’re always doing the same thing, ripping, optimizing, and hoping you’ve left yourself enough icons to work with for the next round. It’s always a bit frantic, certainly a bit messy, and very consistent in the experience that it offers.
That consistency is part of its charm. It’s light, it’s quick, and it never feels like too much. You’re not going to build a whole game night around Tearable Quest, but it’s really easy to fit into the beginning or end of one. Because it’s so light and fast, It’s the kind of game you’re almost never going to refuse, even if you’ve already played it a few times.
Tearable quest is charming and genuinely unique. I can’t think of anything else that turns ripping up a piece of paper into the main event and actually makes it fun. And honestly, it doesn’t really need to be anything more than that.
Disclaimer – A copy of 3 Witches was provided by the designer
One of the things I love about trick-taking games is how effortlessly they get to the table. You generally get a deck of cards and deal most if not all the cards out. The teach is usually something along the lines of “It’s a trick-taking game, but here’s the twist…” and you’re off. The bones of trick-taking games are familiar: follow suit, win tricks, claim victory. Sure, each game brings its own little wrinkles that make each one unique and interesting, but the foundations of the games are usually comforting and intuitive.
3 Witches is not that game.
Or rather, it eventually is. But before you can enjoy the clever little mind games, you need to wrap your head around a teach that feels less like “here’s the twist” and more like “Let me read to you this complex spell from a potion making textbook”
To begin a round of 3 Witches, shuffle the 18-card deck and deal all the cards evenly to three players. Everyone checks their hand and whomever is holding the Elixir card declares that fact. That player doesn’t automatically control the round, though. In fact, they’re now the last player to bid.
Starting with the player to the left of the Elixir holder, they have the option to bid or pass. When it comes to bidding, a player can bid to win either 3 or 4 tricks. If they bid 3 tricks, the subsequent players have an opportunity to bid 4 and take control of the lead position, or pass. Any player who bids 4 tricks automatically ends the bidding round.
Whoever wins the bid becomes the Lead Witch for the round. The other two players form a temporary alliance as the Lesser Witches. The Lead Witch places the bid card in front of them to signify their role. And then the wyrdness begins.
Each trick in 3 Witches is played in a very particular order:
The Lead Witch plays two cards:
One face up (this establishes the lead suit)
One face down (kept secret for now)
The first Lesser Witch must follow suit if able.
If they cannot follow suit, they pass for the moment.
The second Lesser Witch plays a card (following suit if possible).
If the first Lesser Witch had to pass earlier, they now play a card.
The Lead Witch reveals their face-down card.
Now the trick is resolved, but not quite in the usual way. Winning the trick isn’t simply about playing the highest card of the lead suit. 3 Witches uses a small value formula involving the combination of cards played. For example, if two cards of the same suit are involved, they combine their values. The same happens if the two cards played are the same value. If the two cards played are different suits and different numbers, then only the highest value of those cards counts toward determining the winner. Compare the final values, and whoever is higher wins the trick. Also the Lead Witch always wins ties.
It’s clever. It’s quite unintuitive. And the first time you play, everyone will be absolutely glued to their player aids.
After a trick is resolved, the winner gets a bit of control over the tempo of the round.
If the Lesser Witches win the trick, they return one of the Lead Witch’s cards to the Lead Witch’s hand.
If the Lead Witch wins, they secretly choose one of the two cards they played and return it to their hand face down.
That’s right, the Lead Witches cards cycle back. This mechanism gives 3 Witches its delicious tension. Every trick is not only about winning or losing; it’s about which card you want to reclaim and how that will influence the remaining tricks.
Each round lasts for exactly five tricks, then scoring happens. If the Lead Witch makes their bid exactly (the three or four tricks they called, absolutely no more and no less), then they score 2 points. If the Lead Witch misses their bid, each of the lesser witches score 1 point each.
Then, shuffle, redeal, and start the bidding phase again. The game continues until one player hits 5 points, at which point the coven crowns its leader.
3 Witches is a game of temporary alliances and working together to control the narrative. Because each round is only 5 tricks, and the Lead Witch needs to win 3 or 4 of those tricks, the lesser witches need to work together to force the Lead Witch into losing, or, winning too hard.
I know some people find the phrase “knife fight in a phone booth” to be a cliché and overused way to describe close quarters conflict. So instead, I’ll say that 3 Witches is a fistfight in an elevator. At 18 cards, it’s much easier to count cards and deduce information based on what the other two players have already played. More than once during my plays I was able to path out exactly how I could win a round as a Lead Witch, if, and only if, two specific cards were in the same hand.
There’s a ton of smart design in 3 Witches. From the minute 18 card deck that really encourages players to count cards, to having 5 suits with 3 to 4 cards each, to the player with the elixir being the last one to bid, so much of the game design and rules shows that there has been a lot of thought put into every aspect of this small card game. Everything is so finite, so considered, it’s really an impressive showcase of design work by Corey Young.
Contributing to that “wrestling match in a broom closet” feeling is the fact that each round is only five tricks long. The moment the first trick hits the table and cards start revealing themselves, you can feel the decision space tighten. Your options constrict. Unsettling certainty creeps in. As the Lead Witch, you might struggle to lose even a single trick. At the start of a round you might feel chuffed holding two 5s, but the moment you accidentally scoop a trick you were trying to duck, the panic sets in. Suddenly you’re not trying to win, you’re trying to win precisely.
And that’s where 3 Witches feels most exciting.
The 18-card deck means information moves fast. With so few cards in circulation, you can count, deduce, and sometimes even map out the exact path to victory. More than once I’ve sat there as the Lead Witch thinking, This works… but only if those two specific cards are in the same hand. It becomes much less about hoping and more about calculating.
There’s a ton of smart design packed into this tiny box. Five suits with only three or four cards each. The Elixir holder bidding last. The cycling card mechanism that prevents clean attrition. Everything feels deliberate. Considered. Tight. It’s an impressive showcase of design work by Corey Young. The production by AllPlay is svelte too. A tiny box of cards and 12 cardboard chits makes 3 Witches a game that feels far bigger than its footprint.
I also love how dynamic the table politics feel. The Lead Witch changes every round, which keeps the semi-cooperative tension fresh. Winning as a Lesser Witch feels easier, but in doing so you’re handing a point to a rival. Taking the Lead Witch role is thrilling because you can leap ahead with two points. But if you fail, both of your opponents inch closer to their victory. Every bid feels loaded. Every trick feels consequential.
I really appreciate 3 Witches. I love how sharp it feels, how finite and intentional every decision is. It’s not an effortless teach, and I suspect that the strict three-player count will keep it from ever becoming a universal classic. But in the right setting, with those who enjoy kickboxing in a cardboard box, that is to say, counting cards, weaving in and out of tight margins, and that delicious feeling of trying to thread a needle under pressure, 3 Witches absolutely sings.
