Deckbuilding has become an increasingly popular mechanic for co-op games, with newcomer Approaching Dawn: The Witching Hour (2017) following on from the similarly witchy theming of Witches of the Revolution (2017) and of course adventure game co-ops like Aventuria Adventure Card Game (2016) and the classic Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (2013).
The Game
Approaching Dawn: The Witching Hour is a simple game of surviving to dawn: the players must run out the clock while avoiding the game’s potential loss conditions, like gaining too much corruption or losing too many cards from the main supply.
More specifically, what the players have to survive is demons. Each turn, each player may attract new fiends, depending on how much corruption they have and which “sigils” they have opened. They then get to buy new cards from the supply and play cards from their deck, hopefully killing demons in the process (or alternatively: helping their fellows). Afterward, any remaining demons attack. These attacks are what give players the most corruption and what removes cards from the supply, advancing it toward loss.
The Good
While last year’s Witches of the Revolution did a great job of integrating its co-op and deckbuilding play into a coherent whole, The Witching Hour takes the next step, not only producing a well-integrated game, but also one that’s quite innovative in its deckbuilder design.
Card Purchase Focuses on Resource Management. Most deckbuilders allow the purchase of cards in exchange for money (or power points or whatever). That’s technically a resource-management system but there’s rarely much nuance: you buy cards if you can. Every once in a while, a game has varied this: Thunderstone (2009) forced players to decide between buying cards and earning points each round, but it was always a pretty obvious decision: if you could earn points, you did. Witches of the Revolution went a bit further, forcing players to decide for each card whether to use it to earn points or to make more purchases. The choice occasionally required some thought.
The Witching Hour really excels in focusing on this idea of resource management, because it’s is one of the few deckbuilding games where the choice to purchase a card reaches the hallowed ground of being a “difficult decision”. That’s because buying cards also gains a player corruption: in other words, to improve your deck you must gain more of those corruption points that are the biggest threat in the game.
Card Purchase is Costly. To be precise: card purchases in The Witching Hour are very costly. They move the co-op group toward defeat by both increasing corruption and reducing the number of cards in the supply. The corruption gain also increases the odds that the player will face large demons. There’s no other deckbuilding game that punishes players this much for doing for using the game’s main mechanic!
Card Play is Variable. The primordial deckbuilder, Dominion (2008), contains the occasional card that can be used in multiple ways when it’s played. The Witching Hour makes that the whole core of its play, and does it in such an elegant way that the choices seem much more manageable. This all comes about through a light/dark duality to the cards. Each of them can be played for a minor light effect that mostly helps the group or a more powerful dark effect that mostly helps the active players and actually hurts the player to his left by making them more vulnerable to demons, via corruption and open sigils. Whereas more deckbuilders focus their play on strategy deriving from the building of the deck itself, The Witching Hour also supports strong tactics in the play of the cards.
Card Play is Punishing. As with the cost of purchasing cards, there’s not another deckbuilding game where the actual play of the cards is quite so punishing. That can be offset if a player chooses the light play … but by doing so he’ll put himself in grave danger of falling to his own demons.
Card Filtering is Automatic. I frequently laud those games that provide strong capabilities for removing cards from a deck, saying that filtering is the lost mechanic of deckbuilding play. The Witching Hour is one of the only deckbuilders I’ve played that goes above and beyond by making filtering not just possible but both constant and encouraged. It does this through cards that need to be powered by removing certain other cards from play. Most of a player’s starting deck is then marked with the symbol that allows it to be used to power those destructive cards This ensures that whenever a player wants to use one of his special cards he will innately filter his deck. Because there are only a few cards that need to be filtered, the filtering occurs at a manageable rate, so that a player doesn’t filter too much too quickly. It’s also nice that filtering is sometimes difficult choice, as occasionally players might have to give up something that they don’t want to in order to use a good card effect.
Co-op Play is Integrated. As all of this should make obvious, the deckbuilding and co-op systems of The Witching Hour are very well integrated, feeling like two parts of a cohesive whole. To buy cards and to play cards, players must increase the co-op threats that they’re facing. Only then can they use of the effects of cards to defeat those threats. It almost seems like a diabolic pact!
The Bad
The Witching Hour felt like it lagged a bit when I first played it, but I suspect that was a first-game problem. Overall, I had a very positive response to its game design, with just a few minor complaints.
Play is One-Dimensional. There isn’t a lot of variation to the game, which is almost entirely about killing demons. Everything else is a step toward that goal. I would think this could cause long-term interest problems … but then you could also say that Pandemic (2008) is all about killing diseases.
Why Does It Have to Be Witches? I don’t entirely understand the recent witchy trend in games like The Witching Hour, Witches of the Revolution, and semi co-op New Salem (2015). I suppose some folks must like it, but if anything I feel like it makes me less likely to enjoy these games.
Conclusion
I’m not convinced that the game play of The Witching Hour is amazing. As I said, it felt a bit laggy in a first game and is a bit one-dimensional. However, the game design of The Witching Hour, is definitely top rate. It’s full of ideas that could move the deckbuilding category in interesting directions — like the idea that deckbuilding can be part of a larger resource-management system and the concept that cards could have variable powers and be costly to play. There’s a lot in here that I’d like to see more of.
