Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My kids love the movie and begged for this game, so Santa gave it to us for Christmas. The kids were thrilled. The Good: The art is cute. The cards, pieces, and board are good quality. The premise matches the movie and seems like it'll be fun. The premise of the game is to work together to gather ingredients in the cauldron that are either all the same color (eg. all red), all the same ingredient (eg. all Dead Man's Toes), or all the same ingredient in all 5 colors. If you can do this, you "stun" one of the witches which prevents her from casting and moves the sun token closer to dawn. If you get the sun to rise before you run out of ingredient cards, you win. Sounds easy, right? Pfft You wish. This game is HARD and riddled with problems. The Bad: First, you’re not allowed to know what ingredients the other players have. You’re allowed to ask ONE question about color or ingredient (eg. “Who has Boil of Oil”) and the others reply if they do or not. No other information is given. You’re supposed to somehow coordinate a plan with that information alone. This information ended up being useless for any sort of cooperative play and we just stopped asking. Now, you MIGHT have a chance of everyone figuring out some strategy and working together except the instructions says that at the end of each round, you must take ALL the ingredient cards from the cauldron and discard pile, remove the Special cards which have either Binx (one player’s cards are face up for the round) or Book (witches cast a spell) and return those to the play deck. WHAT!?!?! This creates several critical problems: 1) A "round" is usually one trip *around* the table. Each player gets ONE turn to play ONE ingredient card. There are 5 spaces in the cauldron which need to be filled. How are you supposed to fill all 5 spaces AND match every space to stun a witch if you have less than 5 players, can't know what cards everyone has, and are taking all the cards out of the cauldron at the end of each round? 2) You eventually end up with only Special cards, so each player is either having someone show their hand (without being able to discuss a coordinated attack) or casting a spell to mess everything up. 3) You’re constantly returning the ingredient cards to the deck, so you never actually run out for the witches to win. So, it's just a matter of how long it takes to end the game??? We decided to NOT pull the cards out of the cauldron at the end of each round since that rule didn’t even make sense. Another rule is that players can only use the Tricks once. I mean, fair. The witches are only fooled once, but they can cast their spells over and over. When the Spell deck runs out, you shuffle and start again. The only time they can’t cast a spell is if you’ve managed to stun them. Which was nearly impossible. This became a big frustration. Discrepancy Note: The Circle of Salt token says to discard the spell and draw another, but the rule book says to discard and do NOT draw another. Since the point of the token is to help us, we didn’t draw another. After more than an hour (of a supposedly 30 minute game), we managed to stun a witch ONCE. We were so frustrated, we didn’t care anymore. I don’t know why we didn’t just walk away from the game. Both my kids HATED the game at this point and I’m pretty sure I was swearing like a banshee. (Note: According to comments for the YouTube videos we watched, very few people who played this game won. One person said they won twice out of twenty games. Most either never won or won once and gave up the game because it was just too hard.) At this point, we "Noped" the rule book. We played with all our cards face up and discussed our plan of attack based on the cards we had. The kids in the movie worked together and planned things as a team. Why couldn’t we? Even playing like that, we STILL couldn’t get all five cards to match. We’d get to a point where we just needed ONE more card and none of us had the color or ingredient to play. So our strategy had to change. Over and Over. Outcome: * It took us over 90 minutes to end this game. * We had to ignore the rules to "win" (which is exactly what we’d do IRL to save our community’s children, so no shade). * We did NOT have fun. This is NOT a family game. This is a game for adults with a lot of experience a) reading other people’s minds and b) stacking a deck. * We may or may not have hexed the jerk(s) who made up the rules for this game and then didn’t test play it to discover they didn’t work. * My 9 yo daughter is mildly traumatized and literally HATES this game. Conclusion: To quote my daughter, “I’m never playing this game again.” My kids don’t even want to donate this game because they don’t want to “do such a horrible thing” to someone else. >> UPDATE: We watched a few YouTube videos to see if that would clarify things. It was painfully obvious none of them had actually played the game. One guy literally recited the rule book word-for-word. But, we did learn a couple things: Some people are playing so that a round doesn’t end until you stun a witch. This issue is not clearly addressed in the rule book, but it makes more sense why removing cards from the game is a big deal and HOW you can run out of them for the witches to win. Some people consider the ingredients which are part of the cauldron art as ingredients “in play”. Again, this is not in the rule book, but it's certainly helpful. Weeks after playing, my 7 yo son is considering playing again if we use “Mommy Magic” Rules but my daughter growls and leaves the room every time I mention it. She still hasn’t forgiven the game maker(s) for not doing a better job of making the rules clear and testing to make sure the game is child-friendly and winnable. In case anyone wants to try “Mommy Magic” Rules: 1) All players keep their cards face up at all times so we know what our resources are. No secrets just as if it were real life. This means the “Come Little Children” spell card is rendered useless (see Rule 5). 2) You openly discuss what strategy you’re going to use as a team and make suggestions to each other -- just like the movie because this is a COOPERATIVE game. 3) Cauldron ingredient that aren’t covered by actual cards are “in play” because fate often lends a helping hand. 4) The round lasts until a witch is stunned then ALL played and discarded cards go back into the deck. 5) In keeping with the movie, the witches only get to cast their spells ONCE per round. This means all the doubles are removed from the spell deck, except for “Run Amok”. Remove “Come little Children” (as per Rule 1) and use both “Run Amok” cards so Sarah still has 2 spells in the deck. If the witches use all their spells in one round, they have to wait until it ends to have their deck reshuffled. 6) If you play a Binx card, he lets you exchange one card with someone else because he’s a sneaky puss. For fun, send Binx to hang out with the person you’ve exchanged with until another Binx card is played. 7) “Circle of Salt” discards the spell and you do NOT pick up a new one. 8) “Dance Until You Die” does not affect the person who triggered the spell (as per movie). 9) (New Trick Card we created) Je Veux Mon Livre: ALL witches are stunned (stuck in the furnace) and the round ends immediately, BUT the sun token does not move up one space. * (Optional depending on age) Your youngest gets a Do-Over when they just throw a card in the pot because they forgot what the plan was, as long as the mistake is caught before they pick up a card to end their turn. Good Luck!