Boardelv

TEA WITCHES ✨ - before we play

I am calling this post before we play because even though we’ve played the game recently we haven’t finished our gameplay and before posting more about it I want to fully experience the game.

First things first - Tea Witches is not your cute and cozy game! I mean, it is thematically as you are serving tea to witches and the artwork is super adorable… but the gameplay is quite demanding. You’ll need to plan your actions carefully to make sure you’re able to prepare the tea for each witch or at least your loyal customers.

I am excited to play again, this time full gameplay. We had to finish early last time we played mostly because we had to go back home to our dog, if it wasn’t a problem we would most definitely finish the game as we all quite loved it.

Why am I excited for Tea Witches? I’m not gonna lie, mostly for the theme! But mechanically it’s also engaging. Gathering resources, planning the serving, expanding our hut to get more space for tea… all the possible actions are fun and it was hard to decide what to focus on.

I’ll be back with more Tea Witches once I play the whole thing. I am definitely hooked though!

VANTAGE 🗺️🧭

👥 1-6 players

⏰ 120-180 minutes (?)

How about a board game which is kinda difficult to be names a game at all? It’s all about exploring, testing, checking, learning and… experiencing. I guess you could call it a No Man’s Sky on board but please make sure you know what to expect before sitting down to this title as its most definitely not for everyone.

You’re landing on an unknown planet and it was quite harsh - you crashed. The rest of your crew? Also landed… somewhere… for sure. Each of the players is going to explore the planet starting from the random location. You might even meet at some point but this world is huge and it’s easy to get lost so don’t get your hopes up.

There is so much you can do that every time you enter a location you can only pick one action represented by the single word - search, fight, break, wander, speak, trade, look, persuade…. None of it is going to tell you a lot but once you picked you can’t go back. And just like that you’re going to take a single action and go forward, look for a purpose, meet creatures, solve puzzles and many many more.

Vantage is simply beautiful as you get to explore locations and slowly find out about the world around you. You play it in one sitting, might fulfil your goal and then start over from a completely different location. It’s not a campaign but the next time you play you already have some of the information, you can try different paths and options if of course you wander to the same places.

It’s random, you can’t be sure what will happen once you make your choice but something will always change and you’re slowly becoming part of this world.

I don’t want to show you spoilers but there are a lot of cards with items, locations, characters etc. Last photo is a box full of cards so you get the idea.

So is Vantage a good game? I don’t know, I can’t even call it a game. But when we played…? We sat for straight 5 hours with the goals already fulfilled because we wanted to explore more of this weird and entertaining world. It’s an experience.