Whirling Witchcraft from AEG is a fast-playing family game all about resource conversion. 🧙 In this one you aren’t competing for points though! Instead you want to create the most optimal conversion engine to overwhelm your neighboring opponent with resources. 😈

Each round everyone chooses a recipe from their hand of cards, then passes the cards to the left. 🧐 In the next phase you use your recipes to convert resources – the cards show input and output spaces. You have to fill the inputs with resources from your player board, then get to fill the output with cubes taken from the supply. If you are ready, you put everything that was created into your cardboard cauldron 🧉 and pass it to your neighbor. If they don’t have enough space for any of the cubes on their board, you get to place the surplus into your magic circle. Have 5 cubes in your magic circle and you win! 🏆

As rounds go by the game will ramp up, as you are adding a new recipe card each time, and thus have more options to create things. You ideally want to specialize in using up the cubes you receive from your neighbor and create cubes your other neighbor seems to be struggling with.

There are two more components to this explosive game that add an additional layer:
🔮Recipe cards show Arcana icons: whenever you play that recipe card, you can move the corresponding Arcana trackers. Whenever a tracker reaches an even numbered space, you get to activate its special effect.

🧝You can play with asymmetric player powers to keep things interesting, and have some variance between games.

The components are pretty simple: mostly wooden cubes of different colors and cards. The cardboard cauldrons are a nice touch though. 🙂 The gameplay is really tactile as you put and move the cube all over, while thinking of the next recipe card to add. Fast and simple fun if you are playing with family, especially children (the box says 14+ but according to the community on BGG, 8+ is already fine). Seasoned gamers might find its depth lacking though.