Broom Service is an action selection, push your luck, pick up and deliver game.

Title: Broom Service

Year Published: 2015

Designer: Andreas Pelikan, Alexander Pfister

Publisher: Ravensburger Spieleverlag GmbH

Players: 2-5

Game Time: ~75 Mins

Set-up Time: >5 Mins

Ages: 10+

Theme: Fantasy

Mechanic: Simultaneous Action Selection, Pick up and Deliver

How to win: Score the most points by delivering potions.

Game Description

Score the most victory points by delivering potions via Broom Service throughout the magical realm.

Set-Up

In the box comes all the bits for the Basic game and the Advanced game. I’ll cover the basic game here and mention the advanced game in the roundup.

Place the board with the Red bannered castles (basic side of the board) face up.

Each player gets 10 role cards, 2 Pawns and a VP marker of their colour. You also get 1 Potion of each colour. The oldest player starts and this start player and the last player get 1 Wand each, everyone else gets 2. Like you’re not punished for being old enough 🙂

Put 1 heavy cloud (the ones with white stars) randomly face up on each cloud space on the board.

Shuffle the 10 event cards, deal 7 into a pile and return the other 3 to the box without looking at them.

Bewitched Cards

With fewer than 5 players, shuffle the 10 role cards of an unused colour next to the event cards and reveal cards so that the number of these plus the number of players equals 5.

Broom Service Game Play

The game is played over 7 rounds with between 4-10 turns per round.

Each player chooses 4 of their role cards out of the 10 in their hand. The other 6 are put aside for now and the start player plays a card face up. They will read out its name and will declare if they are choosing the brave or cowardly action.

If you take the Brave action – Wait until everyone has played this card.
If you take a Cowardly action – Perform that action immediately.

I’ll go through what each card’s action does later…

After that player declares their card, in clockwise order players MUST follow that card if it is one of the 4 cards they selected. If you are holding that card, play it face up and declare which action you are taking in the same way. Again, if you take the brave action to wait, choose the cowardly action and take it immediately.

If you did take the Brave action any previous player claiming the brave action is ‘Out’ and will not get any action from that card this round, oops!

After each player has claimed an action, the last player to declare the Brave action does it now and will become the start player for the next card. If no one played a Brave action, the start player stays the same or passes clockwise if they do not have any cards left.

If the card you played is a Bewitched card for this round, you lose 3 victory points!

End of a Round

Play continues until everyone has played all 4 cards. If the Event is an End of Round event, resolve it now and reveal the event for the next round. If you’re playing with less than 5 players, replace the Bewitched cards with new ones.

Everyone picks 4 cards from their deck of 10 again and the start player is the last player to take a Brave action in the previous round.

Roles

Let’s take a look at those roles now…

Gatherers – Gain Resources

The cards show which resources you gain and a Brave Gatherer will get more stuff from the supply.

Witches – Move, Deliver potions to towers

If you select a Brave Witch, you move one pawn to an adjacent area with a landscape matching the Witches type. To Deliver, you HAVE to move your Witch first and take the Brave action. A cowardly witch can move but not deliver.

You can move into an area with any number of pawns as long as it doesn’t have any clouds.

Choose one potion to deliver to an empty tower of that colour so if there is no matching empty tower, you cannot deliver a potion. Then, you gain points as specified in the supplied tower. Some towers give you bonus wands so if that tower awards them take them now.

There are two types of towers…

A circular tower can only be delivered once per game, you put the delivered potion on it to show this has happened. The tower is now “occupied” and can no longer receive potions for the rest of the game.

A square tower is not delivered to the tower but back to the general supply so the tower remains open for the entire game. You get the number of victory points indicated by the tower in the same way.

Druids – Deliver potions to towers

For a druid, the same rules apply as a Witch except you don’t move a pawn. A Brave druid receives a bonus of 3 victory points on top of the points scored by the tower as long as they actually deliver a potion.

Weather Fairy – Dispels Clouds

As I mentioned earlier you can’t move into an area with clouds, they must be removed first.

You play the Weather Fairy and a number of wands shown in the star on the cloud in an adjacent region to dispel it. You keep the Cloud token as the Lightning shown on it is used for end-game scoring.

A Brave Weather Fairy gets an additional 3 points assuming you’re able to dispel a cloud.

Broom Service Game End

After 7 rounds the game ends. You gain victory points for Lightning tokens and sets of any Resources you have left over.

Most Points Wins.

The tiebreaker is the player with the most leftover resources.

Broom Service Round-Up

The advanced game, on the other side of the board, has a few extra things…

More complicated clouds, teleportation portals, bonus tokens, abilities etc It’s not more complex overall as the base game plays the same, there are just a couple of extra bits to look out for.

The game itself is fun… Picking your 4 cards is easy… except you look at other players and see where they are positioned and consider that you may not get to use the ability. Your Forest Witch will deliver you a potion if you pick it, but only one Brave Forest Witch can be played each round… How many will others pick it? Where will you be in turn order when it’s played? Will just moving benefit me if I need to be Cowardly?

Click for tips on spotting if someone went Brave or Cowardly

You only play 28 actions per game at the very most so missing out on one is a killer 🙂

Turn order is VERY important… If you’re going last you’re GUARANTEED to be able to use the Brave ability on the card assuming you have it. But then you go first next round so if you pick Brave again, you really are Brave and potentially stupid 🙂

Event cards are good… One MAKES you choose Brave if you go first, but you get a Magic Wand as compensation and probably miss out on your action… The player going last with this Event in play may not pick Brave to avoid going first next time 🙂

Broom Service Rating

A good game I enjoy every so often, especially the advanced game.

I give it 6/10

Broom Service First Impression August 2015

Zooming Brooms put Potions in Motion… That’s from the box, not me.

Not the most descriptive box blurb…

It’s actually a fun game. It plays really quickly too even though we had one very slow player.

Each round has a random event card which can really change your plans. One particularly harsh one FORCED you to go Brave if you went first… What that card is really saying is if you go first, you probably won’t get an action.

While they were fun, you only use 7 each game but there are only 10 in total so they will lose something after a few plays. But, the game won the Kennerspiel Des Jahres so I would assume expansions are on the way?

Summary

I’ve managed to get it played twice this week and the second game was with 3 players and you have the ‘Bewitched’ rule…

When playing with less than the full 5 players you take one of the unused decks, give it a shuffle and lay a few cards out each round depending on the player count.

If you play one of the revealed cards you lose 3 points if you take the action or not. I thought this was quite harsh and potentially unfun… But as players are less likely to play these cards for that round, you may lose 3 points but you have a higher chance of taking the Brave action… Nice balance really.

Still, looking forward to playing it more…

Jesta ThaRogue