Village Crone
SKU: 35422711622

Village Crone

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Description

Village CroneBecome a witch and enter the medieval world of Wickersby in this worker placement, resource management game with spellcasting! Make villagers fall in love, turn them into frogs, or teleport them to different locations. Use your familiars to gather ingredients and cast spells on the villagers to achieve goals and score victory points as you vie to be named the village crone. All the players are witches who have come upon a medieval village without a

Become a witch and enter the medieval world of Wickersby in this worker placement, resource management game with spellcasting! Make villagers fall in love, turn them into frogs, or teleport them to different locations. Use your familiars to gather ingredients and cast spells on the villagers to achieve goals and score victory points as you vie to be named the village crone.

All the players are witches who have come upon a medieval village without a crone. They send out familiars to gather ingredients they can use in spells to complete Witch's Scheme cards. Each of the cards is worth 1, 2, or 3 points, which also indicates how difficult the scheme is to complete. The witch who scores 13 points wins.

The village consists of 6 location game boards: village green, lord's manor, farm, mill, forge, and tithe barn. The locations are modular and can be placed in any order or configuration as long as the gridlines line up. (The easiest way to play is with a 3x2 retangular configuration.)

The villagers, who are the most frequent targets of the Witch's Schemes, have starting locations. The peasant begins in the village green, the lord in the lord's manor, the farmer in the farm, the miller in the mill, the blacksmith in the forge, and the priest in the tithe barn.

The ingredients can be found at 4 of the 6 locations. Silver is in the lord's manor, soil in the farm, flour in the mill, and fire in the forge. There are also 3 eye of newt cards in each stack of ingredients and can be used as wild cards in spells.

At the beginning of the game, each player is dealt 1 of each of the 3 levels of Witch's Scheme cards. Consulting their Books of Spells (which are the same for each witch) to determine which ingredients will be needed to cast the spells on their Witch's Scheme cards, they put 1 familiar in the village green, take turns placing 2 additional familiars in other locations, and draw 2 ingredients from those locations.

The first step in the order of play is to tithe. As soon as each player knows which ingredient they will sacrifice, they place it facedown in the tithe barn. This seeds the tithe barn with ingredients that can be gleaned with the Fortune spell (which allows a player to draw any 3 ingredients from the tithe barn). However, any player who placed a familiar in the tithe barn does not have to tithe.

Then, in turn order, players may move their own familiars and/or villagers and cast spells. (Spells may be cast for strategic or tactical purposes as well as to complete Witch's Schemes.) The movement is limited to a total of 6 spaces, and the number of spells is limited only by the ingredients the player has. The movement and spellcasting can be in any order on a player's turn. A player can even intersperse movement and spellcasting. If a player completes a Witch's Scheme, the card is turned over so that the other players can clearly see how many points that player has. After he/she is finished moving and casting spells, he/she draws 1 of each of the 3 levels of cards, reads them, and decides which one(s) to add to his/her hand as replacements.

When all players have finished moving and casting spells, the players harvest 2 ingredients for each familiar in a location, and the broom (which indicates the first player) is moved clockwise.

The spells are Conjuring (to add up to 2 more familiars into play), Love (to join the fates of 2 villagers, meaning spells cast on one affect the other and movement of one moves the other), Transformation (to turn a villager into a frog or vice versa), Binding (to lock a location down and prevent anyone or anything from entering or leaving a location), Switching (to change the place of 2 familiars and/or villagers), Summoning (to cause a villager to move to a location containing one of the player's familiars), Fortune (to allow a player to draw any 3 ingredients from the tithe barn), and Protection (to block a spell cast by another player). 1 silver can also be used to complete a Scheme out of turn or to discard and draw a new Witch's Scheme card. Each spell requires not only ingredients but also an incantation, which is provided in the Book of Spells. Alternatively, players can make up their own incantations. If a player is caught trying to complete a spell without speaking the incantation, the spell does not work.

Each witch has access to the same number of starting familiars, the same ingredients, the same spells, and 3 Schemes of the same level. But the witch who most cleverly uses these resources to reach 13 points is named the village crone.

The Village Crone also includes rules for solitaire play.

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SKU: 35422711622

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4.6 ★★★★★
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Tracy and Christina
Cuba, US
★★★★★ 5
Amazing!
Format: Kindle, Format: Kindle
This book was phenomenal, I devoured it within a few days! For this being a debut novel, it is fantastic and I would’ve thought the author was a seasoned author. I have zero complaints about this book. Let me start by saying that the world building was phenomenal. I could picture everything in my head because of how detailed it was — that’s how good it was written. And I absolutely love the “captive/captor” trope so much, it’s become one of my favorite tropes, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that this book had that. I loved the banter between Rogue and Ara — they’re both snarky and witty, plus with the romantic tension, it made the dialogue that much better. Speaking of romantic tension, yes there is spice but not so much of it that it overrides the plot, which I loved. For me, this would probably be on the 3/5 level of spice. This book had a ton of plot twists and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 13, 2024
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R Spires
Lake Worth, US
★★★★★ 4
High on Tropes and Satisfaction
Format: Kindle
This is a great Romantasy book full of action, adventure, and everything you look for in this genre. I won’t lie: it does kinda feel like the author found every common trope from every successful book of this kind and threw them all into this novel. But if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Especially in romance, there’s a large audience who has specific expectations, and they want them every time. Nothing wrong with that and many times I’m one of them. I have no idea what defines a spoiler honestly, so spoiler alert!!!!!!! Tropes include: Only one bed at the inn/bar Dissatisfaction with life before hunk appears Lost royalty The chosen one Montage of dress up time followed by shocked hunk Forbidden romance between two from rival peoples Power that cannot be controlled, simply guided/asked Gathering intel at the inn/bar FMC who knows how to fight/use weapons well There’s probably more but no need to list them all. Good story and I would recommend!
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Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2024
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Jeff Gomske
Draper, US
★★★★★ 5
Astonishing, Fun, Entertaining, Fantastic
Format: Kindle
I consider The Martian my favorite fictional novel of the last 15-20 years. The movie was incredible in that they actually followed the book closer than 99% of other films based on books. It remains my favorite movie of the last 15 years or so as well. I don't know anyone (personally) that loves either of them as much as I do. With that said, I was REALLY looking forward to Artemis. It was good...but, it was certainly not in the same caliber as The Martian was (at least not for me). I enjoyed it a lot, however and appreciated how author Andy Weir chose to go in a completely different direction and not just rehash another similar story, which I am certain would have been great as well. As a result, I was cautious regarding Project Hail Mary. It sounded a little too close to The Martian, but yet, also different in that the circumstances simply could not be more opposite and the stakes so much higher. I'm trying to figure out the best way to summarize without giving too much away from this utterly compelling novel. As I read several reviews, I noticed a recurring theme: SCIENCE. Lots and LOTS of science. Holy cow, they were right. Many years ago I read Apollo 13 and Jim Lovell and his co-writer, try as they might, simply could not dumb down Orbital Mechanics anywhere near enough for me to have even a minor clue as to what they were attempting to say...I just skipped 90% of it and hoped that the sentences written afterwards, would help to make sense of what I had just skimmed over. I'm a lot of things, but a math wizard is definitely not one of them. Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park) had an amazing talent for dumbing-down the science of what he was trying to explain in ways that genuinely made sense (most of the time). Not everyone has this talent, and I would say Andy Weir falls squarely in between. He's certainly better than Jim Lovell, but not quite as good as Crichton. But then again, outside of a science textbook, I haven't really read anything with quite as MUCH science as Project Hail Mary. So maybe he's just as good, but he just puts more science into his books than Crichton, maybe that's it...? Either way, be prepared for a lot of astonishingly interesting science within the pages of this novel...and I DO mean a LOT. I don't say this to make you wary or steer you away...on the contrary, Andy Weir has a special talent for making hard science truly entertaining. The book opens with an absolutely amazing and frightening premise: an astronaut awakes from an induced coma to find the only other two people on board have died at some point along their journey...but it gets worse. He has no idea who he is, or why he's on the ship, and oh yeah, they look to be a long way from home. A really, REALLY long way from home. In fact, the sun he sees isn't actually OUR sun at all. He's managed to leave our solar system entirely. And he has no idea why. ((Minor Spoilers)) The book goes through some clever flash-backs, which set the stage for why the mission happens, and slowly, carefully explains how they managed to get so far away from earth in such a short amount of time. Basically, earth's sun seems to be dying. At the rate of decay, we have maybe 19 years left before the gradual cooling has catastrophic consequences resulting in the death of billions (best guess). Why the sun is dimming is quite the conundrum in the first place. Turns out it really isn't dying, it's being killed by an outside source...which turns out to be easily the greatest find in history. It's alien life, and they are using the sun for food, essentially. It's alien life, but not intelligent life. But still, wow! ALIENS, right??? After this monumental discovery, and some tremendous research done by the most improbable scientist, the investigation into what is happening and why and what to do about it expands exponentially to other nations in order to pool all the resources possible to hopefully save the sun, and by extension, the human race as well. They learn. A LOT. A plan is put together, and with the help of the newly discovered microscopic alien life, which can also double as a power source (along with a few other nifty surprises), they begin to create one last, Hail Mary that could very well be the last chance we might have to save earth. It's audacious. It's dangerous, and it is absolutely critical that it succeed. As our astronaut's memory slowly unravels, so does his identity: Ryland Grace. He's a teacher on earth. Just a science teacher. Not even a college professor. He's amazingly smart, though. But he's no astronaut...and certainly not one who would volunteer to go on a one-way mission to another solar system to "try" and save humanity. Yet here he is. Alone. light years from earth, trying to solve the biggest riddle in all of human history. Ryland accepts his situation, such as it is, with relative indifference (for the most part). It doesn't matter HOW he got here. He's here now and he may as well use that time to be as productive as possible, right? Along the way, he unravels even more information regarding the microscopic alien life which is slowly dimming our sun during some additional flashbacks. The aliens, dubbed, "Astrophage" are quite the galactic plague as it turns out. Stars all over the galaxy are also losing their light, all due to the little buggers. All that is, except one particular star named, Tau Ceti. Now why would that one star be unaffected by Astrophage, when every single star around it has been affected to some degree. The plan is to go there and figure it out and send the information back, hopefully in time to save the sun before the damage to earth is beyond repair. There is an incredible amount of stuff going on. The story switches from Tau Ceti to flashbacks of how the whole mission was planned and implemented (which is VERY entertaining, especially Director Stratt, who may actually be my favorite character in the entire novel). Weir is becoming quite adept at building tension, and abruptly switching the story from Tau Ceti back to earth and building more of the backstory then switching back to Tau Ceti. Keeping it all in check and most importantly, interesting all while mixing in a healthy dose of science, which I am to understand is pretty much all genuine, is quite the juggling act. I have long known science can be astronomically entertaining (see what I did there?) when done right...but unfortunately very few people in a position to teach science actually know the best way to create that interest in others. I can say without reservation, Andy Weir definitely knows how to do it...at least in written form. There is so much I want to say more regarding this truly phenomenal story, but I simply cannot without ruining a lot of the fun and surprises revealed along the way...and it is killing me to keep it locked in. Though I labeled a spoiler warning earlier, I don't think it gave away any more than what the author himself has revealed in interviews he has done regarding the book, and what you can glean from reading the summary here and just a couple other reviews. Tying all of that science together is truly astonishing to me. The creativity to put it into a novel that is remarkably exciting to read is nothing more than incredible talent. Kudo's to Andy Weir for not just hitting a home run, Project Hail Mary is a Grand Slam all the way. I truly did not want this story to end. By the way, I enjoyed the ending quite a bit. I don't know if everyone will. But it was fine for me. I think the ending screams "sequel" at some point too. A lot was left open-ended (IMO) and I wouldn't mind reading a follow-up to this. It doesn't HAVE to happen, but there are a lot of ways where the story could go if Andy chose to do it. Just sayin'. Just run out and buy this book.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2021
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Mahlon Everhart
Port Orchard, US
★★★★★ 5
Wonderful
Format: Kindle
The amount of detail in this book is so interesting and the specifics of so much theoretical ideas revolving around true ideas makes it so fun to read. The writer does a great job and describing every situation enough where you get the point but not too much to try to bore you . The book is very easy to follow, keeps you on your toes, was pretty funny to me, and truthfully just a great book for anyone!
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Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2026
J
Verified Purchase
John Haldane
Port Orchard, US
★★★★★ 4
Read it in 2 days
Format: Paperback
This is science based science fiction. How refreshing to read science without turning the story into horror. Without a plethora of characters, it is easy to remember who is who. The story moves along well enough that I wanted to keep going. It us a p age turner in many respects. All this said, there were too many crises suddenly resolved like some Star Trek episode from 1966. It reached the point where I said to myself, "OK, this doesn't matter. Move along, nothing to see here." There was good humor, some surprising twists, and enough involvement with characters that I didn't want to put it down. As science fiction goes, it was good like pulp stories go. It wasn't like Ursula LeGuin or Robert Heinlein but I would probably pick up the next book he writes.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2026

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