WitchHand is a deck-building game created by Jon Nielsen where you play as a witch, leading your coven into new, unfriendly lands. Use the cards you find to build and expand your civilization, befriend the local covens or use their bones to fuel your spells, and gather your familiars, the witching hour is nigh.
A copy of this game was provided for the purposes of this review.
In WitchHand, you will choose your witch which will also determine the difficulty. You will then enter a new realm from your homeland, where you will need to build villages, defeat enemies, gain resources, and cast spells in order to save the fate of your world. You start small with just yourself, a beacon, and the ability to explore, and from there you can vastly expand your repertoire of spells you can cast, summon familiars to aid you, and fulfill quests from your doubtful coven leaders.
Gameplay is very simple as the majority is just placing cards. The difficulty comes from the need for strategy when handling the different quests and events that occur upon each witching hour. The more enemies you defeat, the stronger they get, but you and your familiars can also gain strength, as well as other skills to help in other areas such as diplomacy with fairy cities and merchant attributes to gain special goods from your allies. Doing all of this takes resources, and you can better your resource gathering by building villages and specialty stores such as an alchemist for potions and a mana extractor for mana.
I was easily hooked on this game and played for hours non-stop. I enjoy the simplicity of the mechanics and focusing on strategy. There is plenty to do and decide on to keep the game interesting, and I still feel like I have only scratched the surface of this game. The game is also very pretty, with wonderful art and careful design detailing. It runs very smoothly, even on my older laptop. And honestly, I was itching to keep playing while writing this which is a very good sign for how much I enjoy the game.
Overall, WitchHand is a magical game that is perfect for deck builders and strategists. Even if you are new to those genres, this game is an excellent entry as it is easy to learn and has a fun theme with beautiful art. I highly recommend WitchHand.
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