“You shall not pass!”

Summary
It’s time to gather your best wizards and fling creatively named and colourful spells at each other!

This game is for 2 to 6 players, with the goal of earning two “last wizard standing” tokens by eliminating your opponents as quickly and efficiently as possible. Assemble your spells using the cards and get ready for an epic battle.

Game Play
The game starts by each player choosing a character card – they don’t give you any bonuses – they’re just for fun and to keep track of your hit points. Every player starts the first round with 20 hit points – move the skull markers on your board to keep track of how many you have.

The treasure and dead wizard cards are placed in their respective decks, off to one side. The main deck is shuffled and each player is dealt 8 cards. Within these cards are the following:

● Source cards – when you play your spell, this card resolves first
● Quality cards – this card resolves second, or first if you have no source
● Delivery cards – this resolves last
● Wild magic cards – this can be played in place of any of the above. When you play your spell, you must go through the deck to find a card that can go in its place. If a wild magic card is played in place of a source, for example, you must find the first source card in the deck and use this instead.

A “full” spell consists of three elements – a source, a quality and a delivery, but you can have a spell with two or even one element. The player with the fewest cards played in front of them goes first (unless a player has a card in their spell that says they go first), so sometimes this can be a tactically advantageous way to play. If people play the same number of cards, the player with the highest number on their delivery card goes first – if you have a wild magic card instead of your delivery stage, this counts as zero.

Each player plays their spells until everyone has had their turn. For anyone who lost all their hit points as a result of the round, gets a dead wizard card. These can give bonuses for future games. Everyone else must draw cards from the main deck to take each player back up to a full hand of 8 cards.

Play continues in the same way until only one player remains alive. They get a “last wizard standing” token. Resolve all the dead wizard cards and discard them – all other cards must be discarded, including any treasure gained in the previous game.

A new game begins – everyone returns to full health and draws 8 new cards. Play continues, each player taking their turn for as many rounds as it takes to have one wizard left alive. The first player to gain two “last wizard standing” tokens, wins.

Why should you play?
The first thing that grabs you about this one is the artwork. It’s absolutely bonkers! Everytime you look at a card or the box, you spot something you didn’t notice the last time you saw it. It’s what really makes this game for me.

Well paced – this game moves quickly, but not so fast as you lose sight of what’s happening. Turns resolve quickly and there’s no time to feel bored as you wait for your go.

The crazy spell names – the combination of cards to produce a spell gives you some wacky and wonderful spell names. The rulebook actively encourages you to fill in any blanks on your hand (such as if you don’t have a quality card, for example) with your own, which can make it even more nuts.

What might get on your nerves?
Rounds or games or turns – this might just be me, but I get a little confused with the terminology here. The difference isn’t immediately clear to me, but thankfully there are other people around me who patiently explain it to me every time we play.

Bad hands – you do occasionally find yourself with a hand of all source cards, for example, which can be frustrating. However, sometimes this can work in your favour tactically, so it’s not all bad.

Appropriate Age to Play
Due to the nature of the artwork and what some cards represent, I’d stick to the recommended age limit of 15 or over. Whilst none of the cards are what I’d call overly graphic, they do reference some body parts which may take some explaining. Plus some of the humour would definitely be lost on younger players.

If you like … you’ll like this
Exploding Kittens
Bears vs Babies
Boss Monster

In closing …
With its well-paced gameplay, simple rules and crazy artwork, this game is quite addictive. Playing with a full complement of players may take a while, but you barely notice the time passing. Watch out for those boulder-ific chickens though – they can do some serious damage!