Spellbloom Review
Review by Jonathan F.
Designer: Alexandros Kapidakis
Artist: Laimės Kūdikis
Publisher: Brain Games
1 – 4 players
45 minutes (honestly, maybe 20 min/player)
Played 4 times, once at each player count with a review copy provided by Brain Games
Spellbloom is a very clever dice game with a few layers of complexity and quite a bit of potential for manipulation.
Every player has a board with two rows of five card spaces. The end of the game and scoring will be triggered when someone has filled both rows with spell cards.
Spell cards are drafted from the centerboard, which is set up with six spells. Don’t worry, I’ll get to the dice in a second.
The spells on the centerboard are on six spaces with one each of the colors black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue.
At the start of the game, each player will have one die of each of those colors, roll them, and place them in a personal pool of unused dice on their player board.
Each turn, you may take one of two actions, draft a spell or rest.
The heart of the game is how you draft those spells.
Let’s say I want the spell on the red spot on the center board. I must look at my red die and note how many pips it has. I must then figure out how to pay for it using my other dice. For example, if I want the red card and have a red 5, called the difficulty die, I need to spend that die plus dice with an equal number of pips to the difficulty die. I could spend the green 5, the white 1, and the black 4, or all three of the white 1, the yellow 2, and the blue 2.
Each die I spend is called a provision die. If I spend two provision dice, I get two mana potions – more on them later. If I spend three provision dice, I get three points. Both the difficulty die and the provision dies/dice are moved to the area for spent dice on your player board. You will need to rest if you do not have enough dice to claim a spell card.
If you have reached here and your head is full this might not be the game for you, as there are several additional layers to it.
Spell cards have multiple features, including
Color (pink, orange, light blue, purple, or brown)
Symbol (mountains, trees, waves, cyclone, or flame)
Left half sigil (triangle, square, or circle)
Right half sigil (triangle, square, or circle)
Value in victory points
End-game or In-game bonus.
End-game bonuses have a brown background at the bottom of the card and might earn you two points per wave or blue card. Or you might get 5 points if you have the most trees. Or 5 points if you have more waves than mountains. You get the idea.
These cards can also have in-game benefits. Earn a point if you used a five-pip die. Earn 2 points if you bought a blue card. Reroll your blue die. Adjust your black die +/-2. You track when you used the spell by placing a mana token from the general supply (note, not your supply!). You may only use that spell again once you rest, at which point you remove all the mana tokens on the cards plus one additional one and put them in your supply along with rerolling your dice.
But wait, there is more!
There are four free actions you can do by spending mana!
1. Spend as many mana as you want to to adjust a die up or down without wrapping from 1 to 6 or 6 to 1. I can spend three mana to convert a 5 to a 2.
2. The center board also has six dice, one in each color. You may spend one mana per turn to spend one of the communal dice as if it were the difficulty die or a provision die. The difficulty die must be of the correct color. The central pool is only rerolled when there is one die (or none) in it.
3. You may spend one mana once per turn to wipe a row or column of the spell board. This can be useful if you can buy the blue card but don’t like the one that is there.
4. Activate spells you learned, adding a mana token from the general pool, even to the spell you learned this round, if you met the condition.
By this point, you can tell that this might not be the game for you or your group if you have analysis paralysis sufferers, as you cannot plan and there are quite a few considerations, from which spell you want to how you pay for it. We have not yet covered how you choose where to place it.
The board has half sigils at both ends of each row, such as a half circle on the top left and bottom right, a square on the lower left, and a triangle on the upper right. If your spell matches these symbols to make a whole shape, you get two points per full sigil.
As if this were not enough, six spaces also have special conditions that you can meet to get extra points, such as placing a pink card here for 2 points or placing a tree there for 2 points.
Along with the in-game scoring, at the end of the game (maybe 11-13 turns total), you add the value of the end-game spells, completed sigils, and points for remaining mana tokens.
As a topper, the game also includes personal goals. You get two at the start. When you complete your first full row of five spell cards, you draw two more and discard one of them, so at the end of the game you also score those three personal goal cards.
I found Spellbloom overwhelming at times and also did not want to think so long that others got bored. At the same time, which spells you want, how you will pay for it, and where you will put it is quite a large search space and it is hard to plan. If someone takes the spell you wanted or wipes the row, you need to start recalculating.
I would happily teach the game and play it but would know going in that I would be playing sub-optimally because I have AP in such an open decision space. I think others would find each turn an enjoyable brain-burning mental challenge.
Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers
Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers
- I love it!
- I like it.
- Neutral. Jonathan F.
- Not for me…
