Broom Service Review

A show of hands for all of us who have dressed for Halloween as a witch, wizard, druid, fairy, or the like. My hand is raised. How awesome would it be to actually have power to fly – even by broomstick? Or to make some excellent magic potions? Well daydream no more. Broom Service puts you into the world of flying witches and gathering druids and even Weather Fairies all to help your business deliver potions to towers and other buildings with magical tenants.

At its heart Broom Service is a trick-taking card game with pick-up-and-deliver mechanics flowing to the board. Each player will be attempting to supply the board’s towers and castles with magic potions, but they will need to craft them first. AND one does not simply HAVE potion ingredients handy – they need to gather the correct supplies. The winner of Broom Service is the player who best can supply areas of the board by claiming tricks to increase production of said potions.

To setup place the board in the middle of the table (I am waiting for a game to come along that asks you to place the board in the Northwest quadrant of the table or something similar). Populate the board with the proper Heavy Cloud tokens to be whisked away by players for points and access to additional board areas. Place player score tokens on 10 VP along the VP track. Shuffle the Event deck and randomly place seven cards in a draw pile, revealing one into the discard. Each player will receive their two witch hat pawns to be placed on the main castles, a deck of 10 role cards from which they will choose four each round, a set of one each of the three colors of potions, and magic wands per the rules. The game can now begin!

On a player’s turn they will choose one of their four role cards and place it face down in front of themselves. Once all have done this, the starting player will announce their chosen role and declare that they wish to be Cowardly or Brave. For instance, a player may say, “I am a Cowardly Fruit Gatherer” whilst revealing their role card. By declaring Cowardly, the player immediately performs the action on the bottom of the card for Cowardly Fruit Gatherers: produce one purple potion. In order to perform the actions on top of the card the player would need to declare that they are Brave. The player will not perform the action quite yet as now play continues to the next player in line who, if they also chose to play the Fruit Gatherer card, will declare if they will also be Brave. If so, the newest player to claim Brave will be essentially winning the Brave Fruit Gatherer trick. This continues around the table until the very last Brave Fruit Gatherer has declared and won the trick. The winning player then performs the action while all other previous Brave Fruit Gatherers receive NOTHING. Brutal.

The game continues in this fashion of players bidding on Brave roles for better results (as in the example, a Brave Fruit Gatherer is able to make two purple potions AND another potion of their choice) until players have played seven rounds. They then add up their points per the rule book and the winner is determined!

Now, this is a brief explanation of the trick-taking aspect of the game, but other roles actually allow players to deliver the potions made, and still others allow players to use their magic wands to whisk away Heavy Clouds for VPs and remove their board space blocking qualities. Each time a potion is delivered, the player will earn VPs. The trick-taking aspect is simply the gist and also crux of the game.

Components. I love the components in Broom Service. The board is nice and super colorful, with all areas easy to read and understand (though some players have issues with where the towers actually lie on the board, but you must look at which area the BASES of the towers touch to determine this). The cards have wistful artwork on them and the art throughout is stellar. The wooden witch hats and potions are all great, and I love the colors used on these – I mean, orange and purple go super well together. And then there’s green. All in all the components in Broom Service are just great.

That said, I give Broom Service excellent marks because it truly is a better implementation of its predecessor, Witch’s Brew, in almost every aspect (even though my wife disagrees). The art is better, the components are better, the addition of the board and its mechanics add so much to the game. I love being able to travel to different areas of the board to deliver items, and I really don’t have too many pick-up-and-deliver style games, so this really fills a niche in my collection. Also, on another personal note, Halloween happens to be my favorite holiday and Broom Service is certainly a game for that season. I am definitely not alone in my assessment of this one, as Purple Phoenix Games gives Broom Service a whooshy 14 / 18. Come at me on this one because I am defo a Brave Mountain Witch… or just a normal reviewer who likes this game a whole lot.