Weirdwood Manor

• Designer: Mike Cassie
• Publisher: Greyridge Games
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 13+
• Time: 90-120 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by distributor, Flat River Games

Weirdwood Manor is a cooperative board game that marries great adventure gameplay with some euro-inspired underpinnings, as you and your group of valiant companions battle to protect Weirdwood Manor and its enigmatic ruler, Lady Weirdwood, from an invading Fae Monster and his Clockwork Scarab minions.

The Manor is a mysterious and magical place where rooms and the pathways between them can shift as time progresses.  When you set up the game, you randomize the 11 rooms in the outer ring, the 11 rooms in the middle ring, and the 5 rooms in the inner ring.  Each ring is separated from its neighboring ring with a circular corridor ring-board.  The game has a few extra “Expert” rooms which can be added in when you are more experienced with the game. 

The game features a unique temporal mechanic; every time a player or the Fae Monster takes an action, time will move forward in the game and the connections between the rooms will shift via unique rotating corridor rings on the game board. Players have some agency in how to use their actions to affect how quickly (or slowly) time moves, but beware, if the players use up their allotted time and have not defeated the monster, they lose!  Time is marked on the two corridor rings.  The outermost ring is the day corridor, and it marks the 12 days of the game.  The inner ring shows the time of day, split into 4 parts (morning, afternoon, evening and night) with three positions in each section.

You will assume the role of one of six asymmetrically designed characters as you battle against one of the three different Fae Monsters, each with their own unique mechanics and loss conditions. You’ll make use of dice drafting, card play, resource management, and location actions as you move through the ever-shifting Manor in pursuit of the Fae Monster and his minions. You can also recruit additional companions to aid you and you will improve your character’s abilities as you earn experience.

Each turn, the players will use cards from their unique deck to take one primary action.   You can play your action card at any point in your turn. When you do, you must be able to pay the cost of the card (if it has one), then you place the card faceup or facedown above one of the Time of Day slots on your player board.  You then rotate the Time of Day ring on the main board to match the slot you played the card to.  If the card is face up, you resolve the text on the card.  If the card is facedown, you choose to Move, Attack or gain 1 Resource.  As you play cards to different slots, if you are able to make a full icon between neighboring cards, you’ll also gain the bonus for that icon.  During your turn, there are also some optional actions that you can take (seen on your player board or Companion cards).

However, after each player’s turn the Fae Monster will act, using their own custom deck of cards.  Each of the three different monsters has their own deck of cards and unique game setup.  Your group can choose the Monster they want to face based on the desired difficulty (or just for variety).

Then, check to see if you need to reset your action cards.  You must do so if you have no empty spots left but you can also choose to reset if you wish.  You must perform a Scarab phase and then you discard all the played Action cards.  In a Scarab Phase, the scarabs on the board try to move to outer rooms and new Scarabs spawn in the center and a room becomes blighted if it has 2 or more scarabs in it.  This room is flipped over and cannot be used while in the Blighted state.

Rooms can offer additional actions and benefits. When you move between rooms, you do not have to count spaces; you can simply move to any room that you can reach via corridor connections.  The one exception is that you have to stop in any room that has an enemy in it; you have to stop and fight!   As well, players can make use of their own unique player and companion powers. These combinations can create varied and potentially powerful chains of actions on a player’s turn.  

Players can earn XP (experience points), and there are three different tracks on the player board.  Whenever you gain XP, you can choose which track(s) to advance; and as you pass icons on each track, you’ll get benefits.  You will also get a much larger bonus for each track which you’re able to get to the final space of.

As the game progresses, the Fae Monster’s strength will grow and things will become more dire for the players so they will have to work together to solve the challenges in front of them. The game offers deep tactical choice and a degree of unpredictability that will make traditional leader quarterbacking virtually impossible; the players will truly have to strategize as a group to succeed as the threat deepens!

And so, if the players can defeat the Fae Monster before time runs out (at the end of day 12) – or before the Fae Monster completes his own unique victory condition, the players will win the game and have kept Weirdwood Manor safe for now… until the next threat arrives!

My thoughts on the game

Weirdwood Manor is played on an ever-changing board, and this makes you constantly reassess what you can do (and what you need to defend against).  Pathways through the manor are in perpetual flux, and you should always keep in mind how any rotation will affect the rooms that the players and/or scarabs can reach.  Planning ahead for the changes in the architecture is a big part of winning a game of Weirdwood Manor.

Managing time is one of the most interesting aspects of this game.  Anytime that you have to move time forward, you must always move the time of day ring forward at least one space; so there are times when you have to choose your action slots carefully to try to maximize the number of actions you get per game.  There are certain actions which will even let you move time in reverse, and you can get some really nice combos if you’re able to work it out right. 

I also love the idea of the modular room set up and the rotating corridors.  And then, when you combine these timing and the rotation – sometimes you have to fuss around with the rings to see if you need to maybe choose a later time to play your card so that the hallways line up with whatever your plan might be.  It’s a neat challenge, and one that I hadn’t really seen in the past.

The rules are a bit disorganized for my tastes – I think that everything is in the rules, but not presented in a way that my brain was able to grok on the first pass.  Different aspects of the game are put into their own areas of the rulebook – but I found it hard to piece it all together.  It took us ten minutes to figure out that the flow of the game was Player Turn then Monster turn (activating a card).   We also spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what the “score track” was on the outer rim of the board, only realizing at the end of the rules that this was the variant group XP track.  Surely that could have been denoted earlier…   Of course, some of this may just stem from the fact that these sort of games are not in my wheelhouse, so concepts that might be familiar to bigger fans of the genre only serve to confuse me.   Additionally, because my brain didn’t like the organization, it made it hard for me to find the necessary rules to answer questions that came up – and with all the different cards and player actions, we had LOTS of questions in our first game.   And, yes, I have read online that plenty of people feel that watching a video with a playthrough is the way to learn the game.  But that’s not my style and never will be – I learn games from the rulebook alone, and I had lots of problems doing so with this particular rule book.

There is a lot going on in the game, and it took me a few times to parse the rules, but at least the icons are pretty straightforward.  It did take me a game or two to get used to the system that icons in red are costs and non-red are gain.  For a short while, my brain kept thinking there were green books which were different from red books.  But, once you get the system down, it makes things mostly intuitive.

The game felt extremely hard.  In our first game, we wondered why we were given a card in setup that allowed us to portal.  Then, as we played though the first turn, we realized that it was guaranteed that the fourth player wouldn’t start their turn until Day 2.  Which meant that they were trapped in the starting room; which meant that they were forced to play that card to portal out.  Which also meant that their whole turn was just escaping the room that the game trapped them in and not getting to figure out any fun or meaningful play on their turn.  Sure, they got to pick what room (in the outer ring) they could jump to; and then they could take that room action – but in the end, it felt like it just sucked to be that player who waited 40 minutes to then take a mindless turn that was forced upon him by the game.  Ugh.

As the game continues on, the rotation rooms continue to be a focus of discussion. You can always see the next Monster card (and know how far it will move the corridor), but only the top one.  So, you can plan a bit for the next person in turn order, but not more than that.  Well, I suppose you can modify where you want to move the inner corridor each turn once you figure out how far the Monster card will go.  Of course, in a four player game, you also have to always remember that the day will change before that person gets to go – and in some cases, even the third person in order might be going on a different day.  Maybe we’re not good planners, but this was a level of planning beyond the scope of our abilities.   After we realized that the rotation was too unpredictable to foresee things that far, we just did things and hoped for the best, why spend five minutes arguing over possible paths when lady luck would let us know what was possible and what was not?

picture taken by game designer

We also found that many of our turns felt like temporizing turns.  While some of the action cards offer multiple actions, others felt weak.  There also didn’t feel like there were enough cards that allowed us to attack.  Sure, you can always flip a card over to take a wild basic action, but it didn’t feel like there were enough cards that let you move and attack.  So, you either end up taking turns where you get to move into the room with the bad guy, and then you have to wait through three player turns (and three bad guy turns) hoping that the bad guy doesn’t move so that you can attack him on your next turn.  Or you just end up doing stuff, and then hoping that you’re close enough to the bad guy so his card forces him to chase you as you’re the nearest good guy, and then he’ll come to you so you can attack him.   Alternatively, the player before you might move into the room that allows someone else to portal (thus moving you into the room with the baddie), and hopefully nothing will cause you or the baddie to move out on the Monster turn…  For me, in a game about fighting the bad guy, it felt like a lot of work to get to the fighting… and a lot of turns where it felt like all I did was run around the manor and pick up supplies.

Given the way the timer goes, taking a temporizing turn seems like a waste when players are only getting 5 or 6 turns in the game before we lose.  It takes a few turns to generate enough resources and dice to be able to do anything meaningful, and then by the time you accomplish that, it’s already day 5, and the Chaos Ogre is now twice as strong, and you have to spend two more turns to try to meet its new level of strength….  Again, I wish the rules had suggested that I try the game with two, maybe 3 if I was adventurous, at most.  Because it would have saved me from such a negative first experience with four as we tried.  (Reading online, many other games agree with this recommendation of not playing with more than 2 or 3 to start with).

It might be unfair to say that the game doesn’t scale well after that first experience, so after my first failed 4p game, I set it up again and ran a 2p game by myself, and at least a lot of the blocking issues fixed themselves.  It was also much easier to try to plan ahead with only three turns intervening (monster, partner, monster) before I got to do something else.  But, the other frustrating bits didn’t change.  I still haven’t come close to winning, and while I’m sure I might get better at it with more experience, the high difficulty level (at least for me) is enough to discourage me from trying again.   And now I feel like I have enough data points to say that the game does not scale well.  There actually isn’t any scaling.  Playing with more characters gives me more figures to run around, but not enough time to build up any one character to do anything useful.  I shudder to think how bad it would be in a max 5p game….  

Chaos Ogre deck – pic taken by designer

I haven’t ventured past the first monster (Chaos Ogre), but man, once you hit the third rage step – at Day 9 – the game might as well end.  He rolls so many dice at that point, I can’t see any chance to win.  And since you get about 3 player turns per Day – that’s only 24 player turns to beat him down; not likely in my experience.  Which equates to 6 turns per character in a four character game – and let’s not forget here that player 4 (and sometimes even player 3) is forced to teleport into another room, so all they get is a single room action, limited to an outside ring room.  And then, based on timing, someone else earlier in turn order might have to spend part of their turn getting a teleport action for that 4th player lest they get trapped again on their next turn…

With so many other games to play, I’m admittedly not one to keep going back to something that feels so hard to win – if I’m in the mood to be constantly frustrated, I’ll just go watch the English national football team play on repeat on my DVR and find games that are more enjoyable for my limited gaming time.  Trying to keep struggling at a game that so soundly beats me up is not for me.    And for anyone who is thinking about this, I cannot stress how much I would recommend trying this with no more than 2 characters for your first game.  Or else, you might end up with the same sour taste in your mouth that I had with the four player game.  

To put it in perspective, I felt exactly the same way about Spirit Island – which is a game that many people love; I found it more difficult than I wanted.  I gave my copy to another Opinionated Gamer – who LOVES it and has played the heck out of it.  So, maybe, if you think Spirit Island is your jam, this should be one to consider?  Like I said, there are a lot of neat ideas that are worth exploring; but this one is clearly not for me, and in an environment where there are so many new games to try, this one will hopefully find a more loving home for itself in the near future.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor