Baba Yaga

Woooooooo! Avoid evil spells, gather witches and effectively use large seaside birds on your way to victory in this light card game from Gamewright.

Gamewright isn’t a publisher I normally give much time too. Their range is mostly targeted at a younger audience and doesn’t usually appeal to me but we picked this one up a couple of years ago when  browsing the shelves at the local game store just because the box and description caught our eye.

It’s a standard ‘draw 5 cards and do something with them’ style game where the aim is to selectively trade the cards in your hand with the cards on the table until what you hold equals four or less. It’s quite straightforward to learn and plays quickly but there’s enough strategy in it to make it interesting. We often use this as a filler game when we only have 15-30 minutes free and want to pass the time. It may also have some educational value as you have to do addition of your potion cards to be able to play the other cards but who wants to think about that?

It comes in a small format box, about two decks of cards wide and about 2 decks high. It’s a solid glossy cardboard and seems to be holding up well.

When you lift the top off, you can that there’s a rule pamphlet, a couple of promotional leaflets and the cards themselves set inside a plastic insert. The cards are standard playing card size and have a slight linen finish. They have stayed flat and aren’t showing much wear even after many plays.

The cards come with three different back colours. Most have a black back, and they are the ones you will use to form your starting hand and draw from. The other two are the Owl cards (blue) and Baba Yaga (red) cards. These are never drawn normally and can only be gained by activating the pelican spell card from the black cards. The owl can be traded for two baba yaga cards, while the baba yaga has a value of 0 so reduces the total in your hand.

I initially thought that having different colour backs was a bad idea because it meant that your opponents can see how close you are to winning but once you look at the spell cards you’ll see why it’s this way.

These are what the black cards look like. There’s a lot of potion cards with different numbers, a wild potion card that can be used as any number, plus four different spell cards. If you have a spell card you need to play it plus potion cards exactly equaling it’s point value to activate it.

Each of these does something different

• Pelican card – when you play this, you can choose to either pick up a blue owl or red baba yaga card. I told you, large seaside birds play a big part in this game!
• Garlic Card – you can play it at any time without needing to trade potions in for it to block a spell card.
• Lost Wand – Make everyone but you return either an owl or baba yaga to the table and draw a random card from the draw pile
• Cats – Take a baba yaga or owl from a player of your choice. Also good for losing friends or making your significant other mad.

Example play

The table gets set up like this, though this is a few turns in to show the two discard piles. During your turn, you can either play a spell card, or discard a card to one of the two discard piles and either take the top card from the other discard pile or the draw pile. The only time you can’t take a card from a discard pile is if it’s a spell card that has been activated rather than just discarded.

Because the other players can take the card you discard, you have to be careful with what and where you discard. Assuming that the other player discarded that pelican to make room for potion cards, you might try and pick it up to use it. On the other hand, you may want that 7 instead to activate an owl card next turn so you go for it instead.

Imagine you have these cards in your hand. You have a pelican and potions totaling seven so you can play it to one of the discard piles and take either and owl or a baga yaga

This is what your hand will then look like. You still need to draw three random cards from the draw pile so you have five again, but if you do the same thing a few times you’ll soon have a hand worth less than four and are the winner. You may instead decide to go for the owl card rather than the baba yaga knowing you can get 7 points worth of potions in your hand fairly quickly and then trade for two instead.

I really like the game. I know some other reviewers have said that there’s too much “discard one, pick up one, repeat” to it but I really haven’t found that to be a problem. You may have to change your strategy a bit based on what comes up in the discard piles and to slow the other players down but it’s always fast and I’ve found it really playable. We’ve only played it with two players and it works great there, I’m sure it would be fun with more as well though.

Sadly it seems to have been discontinued by the publisher but it’s still available online in a few places so it’s worth getting a copy while you can.