Wispwoood: A Mystical Delve Into Tile Placement

“Magical lights have lured your cat into the forest. The wisps from the Old Tales! Fulfill their wishes to illuminate and shape the ever-changing forest.”

Overview of the Game

This week, our group got to try out Wispwood. This is a tile-placement game for one to four players, ages ten and up. Wispwood was designed by Reed Ambrose, and published by Czech Games Edition (CGE). Each game takes about 45 minutes. We were sent a demo copy of this game, as well as some prize support to run games in the store.

Components

The cover art for this game really caught my eye, featuring colorful wisps and a cat that looks to be straight out of a Tim Burton animation. The components inside the box are equally gorgeous, featuring six very unique cats you can choose from. Each one is beautifully drawn and has its own personality. The pond, which goes in the center of the table, is very pretty. All of the components are well-made, even if they did give me flashbacks of a certain fairy that refuses to be ignored..

Gameplay Mechanics

Wispwood has  a few unique, mechanical twists to help separate it from the pack of other tile placement games on the market. The game is played over three rounds, and your grid size grows at the beginning of each round. You’ll start with a 4x4, and end with a 6x6 grid. 

You start with your cat, which you can place anywhere in your grid. You’ll also have 5 different objectives you’re trying to reach during the game. Four of these come from the objective decks. Each wisp has their own objective that you draw at random from their deck. One of the wisps, the witch, acts a little differently. Their objective card tells you how to score points with it, but it also gives you a rule for how it has to be played, such as: “The witch can only be played diagonally from your cat or another witch."

You spend each of your turns choosing the wisp you want from the pond. The wisp you choose will have two shapes adjacent to it, and you choose which shape you’d like to use for that wisp. When you add a wisp to your grid, you’ll form the rest of the shape you choose with tree tiles. You can place the shape in any orientation you want, as long as at least one of the tiles is orthogonally adjacent to another tile in your grid.

If there aren’t any shapes you want on the pond, or you don’t want any of the wisps that are currently on the pond, you can hide your cat to refresh the pond or to take any shape you want from somewhere on the board. This means you flip your cat over, so it's hiding behind a tree trunk. Your cat stays hidden for the rest of the round, or until you take a “Tree Turn”.

Taking a “Tree Turn” simply means placing up to three tree tiles in your grid instead of taking a wisp from the pond. This can help you fill in empty spots in your grid, or bring your cat back out of hiding and ready to take another “Cat Action”. 

Game End

When one player completely fills their board, everyone else gets one more turn before the round ends. At the end of the round, everyone will add up their points from all their wisps, plus some extra points if you completely filled your grid. You’ll take all of the tree tiles off of your grid, leaving only the wisps behind.  Then, cats flip back to their ready side, and the grid expands to the next size up.  After completing the 6x6 grid, the game ends.

My Thoughts

The fact that the wisps stay behind, forcing you to rebuild your grid around them, adds a unique challenge to the game. You have to be strategic from the very beginning in order to score the most points. This is a feature that I haven’t seen in many tile placement games, and it adds extra depth that we all enjoyed.  

Unlike many other tile placement games, Wispwood never feels like four different people playing solitaire. Each player has the ability to actively thwart other players’ goals by denying them shapes or wisps that they know someone else needs. The fact that the wisp scoring methods are randomized each game ensures you can replay this game multiple times, and you can always use different strategies. In most circumstances, you are heavily rewarded for focusing on one type of wisp, but I believe this works out well because of the other players' ability to disrupt your plans.

In Conclusion

We had a lot of fun with this game. The mechanics are simple enough that it’s easy to learn, and there is enough strategy involved to be fun for players who have more experience with this genre.

 I would recommend this game to any group who wants to get into tile-placement games, as it’s an excellent starting point. Even groups who are already experienced with the tile placement genre will be able to find some enjoyment in Wispwood. 

The demo nights we have run for Wispwood have been met with almost nothing but positive feedback from players. The only issues have been from the slightly ambiguous wording on scoring conditions.

In conclusion, Wispwood offers a great gaming experience, with beautiful, slightly spooky art. It’s a great game for both beginners in the tile-placement genre, and experienced players.

If you would like to buy a copy of Wispwood or browse our board game selection, you can do so here.