Game 411: Broom Service

Broom Service is already on the radar of many gamers since (1) it's the newest big box release from alea, Ravensburger's brand for more involved games, (2) it's a new version of Andreas Pelikan's well-received (but out of print and ridiculously expensive in English) Witch's Brew, and (3) it's been nominated for the 2015 Kennerspiel des Jahres award, which suggests that the game has some staying power given that the SdJ jurors tend to play titles to death to ensure good experiences with a wide range of gamers. (Witch's Brew was nominated for Spiel des Jahres in 2008, but lost to Keltis.)

All that said, what's Broom Service? In this game for 2-5 players, you collect potions, then deliver them across the land with your two witches to towers that advertise their desires with color-coded roofs. Each time you deliver a potion, you earn victory points (VPs) and possibly a magic wand or two. While traveling the land, you might use these wands to dispel clouds that shroud particular regions and prevent players from delivering to them. After seven rounds, the game ends, everyone scores bonus points for the clouds they've dispelled and resources they still hold, then the player with the most VPs wins.

The heart of Broom Service is a transplant from Witch's Brew: a set of role cards for each player. Each role card features a cowardly action — something minor that you do immediately when you play the card — and a brave action — something major that you get to do only if someone else doesn't turn out to be braver than you. This risk/reward dynamic is at play throughout the game, and it's a big part of what gives the game its juice: Do you take something now to ensure you don't get hosed? Or do you risk that hosing in order to do something grander and increase your chances of winning? That tension is in place nearly every turn.

So how do you play those cards? At the start of each round, each player secretly chooses four of the ten role cards. These cards let you:

• Gather potions and magic wands, with the potion gatherers coming in three colors to match the potions
• Move and deliver potions, with four witch cards to correspond to the four types of landscapes and with you being forced to move in order to deliver
• Deliver potions without moving, with two druids that are each able to deliver to two types of landscapes
• Dispel clouds, with only one fairy able to do that and with you being unable to move into regions covered with clouds

Once you've chosen, the round's start player begins the first turn by laying down a role card of their choice and announcing whether they're brave or cowardly. Each player in clockwise order must play the role card if they have it, likewise announcing whether they're brave or cowardly. If you're cowardly, you take that tiny action, then get out of the way. If you're brave, you wait to see whether anyone who follows you is also brave; if they are, you get nothing for your bravery other than bitter regret as only the final brave player on a turn gets to take that brave action. (If you don't have that role card, you simply pass.)

Once this brave player has acted, the brave player lays down a different role card to start the next turn; if everyone was a coward, then the previous start player starts the next turn. This rotating start player carries over from Witch's Brew, and it's one of the other key elements of gameplay. You want to go last in a turn because you can be brave and not have that big action taken away; you want to go first because you can choose which role is played. That pull between wanting to go first and last is strong, especially since the success of certain actions might depend on when they take place in the round. After all, you can't deliver what's not in hand and you might not be able to move to the forest until you've moved to the prairie first.

Turns continue until everyone has played all of their cards.

Despite sharing the same heart, everything else in Broom Service differs from Witch's Brew. In that earlier game, the action was all in the cards. You collected ingredients, then claimed potion cards, or cast spells, or stole ingredients or money from other players. In this revamped game with co-designer credit for Alexander Pfister, you still have that constant interaction due to the cards, but now you're also competing to deliver to this tower or dispell that cloud before anyone else. You can (sometimes) use the position of opponents on the game board to make guesses as to which cards they'll choose. The design feels more expansive because there's more to consider in each round while also upping the ways in which you can bump heads with opponents — and because of that interaction, that elevation of the contest from the table itself to the players sitting there, I can understand why some favor Broom Service over Elysium for Kennerspiel.

Aside from those basics, Broom Service has other tweaks over Witch's Brew, with the biggest one being the addition of "bewitched" role cards. In games with fewer than five players, you take a set of unused role cards and reveal 1-3 cards at the start of each round prior to players choosing their roles. (With two players, you reveal three cards; with 3p, two cards; and with 4p, one card.) Any player can still choose to use these bewitched cards in the round, but as soon as you lay that card on the table, you lose 3 VP, whether or not you actually take that action. So far I've played twice on a press copy with two players both times, and that VP hit is a nice twist that girdles your choices, while still allowing you to spill over that constraint if you desire.

Having an option to play with two is one of the other changes from Witch's Brew as that game supported only 3-5 players. A smaller change is that the lead player each turn can choose to be cowardly instead being forced into bravery.

Still another change is that Witch's Brew had spell cards, with a new spell being available each round and the use of that spell being tied to a role card. In Broom Service, ten event cards are included, and one new event is revealed at the start of each round, with events rewarding or punishing players for where their witches are located at the end of the round; allowing players to take VPs instead of the cowardly action on their card; forcing the first player each turn to be brave (as in the original game); allowing players to choose the number of role cards (1-5) they take that turn, with a VP bonus or penalty based on what you choose; or having other minor effects that give you that little something extra to consider on top of everything else.

The final big change from Witch's Brew is the inclusion of four mini-expansions in Broom Service, with two of those expansions being tied to the reverse side of the game board. Yes, it's double-sided, thereby allowing an entry level side for newcomers and family gamers for whom the role-choosing and potion delivery will be challenging enough and an advanced side for those who want to pile on the options and variety. In short, these expansions are:

• Storm clouds that provide bonus VPs or additional actions when you dispel them
• Mountain tiles and amulets, with each tile providing a special one-shot action to those who visit it, along with an amulet that provides additional endgame VPs depending on how many you collect
• Forest tiles that provide to whoever first claims them a one-shot bonus, such as additional role card at the start of a round or the ability to take a brave action even when you're being a coward
• Hill tiles that transform particular hill regions into portals that instantly teleport you to one of two stone circles on the board, with you choosing where you go; this side of the game board has regions cut off from everything else thanks to rivers that you can't cross, so teleportation is your only means of reaching them, with one of the islands not allowing a return trip!

I've used only the first two expansions in one of my games on the basic game board, and they nudge the complication factor up a tad over the basic game. You can use them separately if you like, but once you head to the advanced side of the game board, you must use all of the landscape tiles, with the clouds still being optional. (For each type of landscape tile, you always return two to the box, thereby allowing the publisher to tout some huge number of possible combinations of arrangements. The clouds are treated similarly.)

Many people have pined for Witch's Brew to return to print, but that's because they speak English. German copies were available at closeout prices for years after that game's release in 2008, and in fact they're still available through Amazon.de and probably through other retail outlets as well. Thankfully you now have another option, one that delivers the experience of the original game wrapped in a larger cape and with multiple styles of pointy hat for additional game wardrobe customization.