During one of Wise Wizard Games‘ many Kickstarters, I added a copy of Sorcerer to my add-ons. I figured it was just another variant of Star Realms or Hero Realms in a Victorian Urban Fantasy setting and the box went unopened for many months. (Your Aunt Stephanie and I don’t play games like this very often, which is kind of a shame because we have quite a few.) Today the power went out as Portland got hit with SNOWMAGEDDON 2024! (There’s snow on the ground and everything. Trees are going down. The town is out of kale. It’s a panic zone out there!)
So we decided to break out Sorcerer and give it a try. It’s a much more complicated game that any other Wise Wizard offering. So it took us a long time to set up and read through the rules and try to grok the gameplay.
We discovered Star Realms on TableTop with Wil Wheaton many years ago, and we got a copy of the game and enjoyed playing it for a while. We stopped playing just because we aren’t really a game-playing family. We got Hero Realms and enjoyed that as well, but the energy wasn’t there. Epic looked good but I’ve never figured out all the rules. It was incredibly complicated.
So Sorcerer.
Once it got going it was nice and dramatic and it was a race to the finish. Like all good games it came down to the last few die rolls and after feeling pretty sure I was going to get CRUSHED, I snuck through to win the game. It was an exciting moment and I already know the tub is fairly comfortable.
Setting up the game took us a long time because we were trying to understand the game, and I didn’t quite grok the fact that the game is made up of 12 individual decks. I was expecting a draw deck like other games. However, it meant starting with one of 64 permutations to start with. If we knew the cards better we could have chosen, but instead we went random. I thought the 12 initial cards were the “character deck” and it took me some time to fully understand the Skill card is connected to a bunch of cards, and each Lineage card is connected to a bunch of other cards, but we figured it out.
In other deck building games (Magic, Star Realms, Hero Realms, etc.) the first rounds are building rounds. Maybe a fast poke at an enemy, but it takes a while. Sorcerer starts with six rounds of setting up before actually starting the battle, and while it was a little confusing to read the handy Action Tracker on the player board, we got the hang of it. That first round of battle was meaningful, once we got there.
I found the game relatively balanced. Each round you have energy to spend and I ended up trying a strategy of spending all my energy during each Action segment, which was a mistake. I thought (mistakenly) that the game had a reset mode each round, but it doesn’t (other than untapping activating cards on the board). When I rolled the Energy die to see how much energy we’d get, I rolled 1’s and 3’s. Aunt Stephanie rolled 8’s which meant I at least had a chance. So there was a strategy to keeping energy between rounds I failed to manage.
The Action phases are nice, because you can think about the game in a turn-by-turn basis without too much risk, but still get a chance to think about things. I had zombies and a card in my hand that gave zombies power. Getting hold on to that card to play for my last action so Stephanie couldn’t stop me was a small win, and if that’s all I had gotten I would have been happy with it.
The Battle phases were manageable and not too chaotic. The omen mechanism is fun. No, you don’t get that critical hit, reroll! (Rerolls the critical. Shakes fist at sky. Damn you fate!)
This first game was challenging because we didn’t get the flow down at first, and forgot all the little rules. One of the reasons we stopped playing Magic the Gathering is the proliferation of rules and how complicated the game got, and that was twenty years ago. I have no idea how baroque the game is now. Sorcerer starts with that level of complexity. We lost several opportunities for advancement in our strategies because we simply forgot the cards could do things for us.
IT also meant we couldn’t enjoy the flavor of the game. The world the game builds looks like it would be quite fun to explore, but we were so occupied with understanding the rules we couldn’t enjoy the sheer creepiness of it all. We’re not quite horror fans anyway, but we don’t really have problem with zombies, sirens, wraiths, and all that. We’ve played T&T (well, I have) and we’ve both played D&D. We just don’t spend a lot of time in that world.
Would we recommend the game? Absolutely. It’s a lot of fun and well balanced. The mechanics worked for us. I suspect we’ll play another game some day. This one took a couple of hours. I don’t know how long the game typically lasts. It could make a good evening activity.