Sinister Fish's Wizards & Co is a card-driven battle game for 2-4 players. You take on the role of competing wizards who are sending their minions into the dungeons of a powerful but demised necromancer to loot his treasure trove of gemstones. The game is designed by Flaminia Brasini, Virginio Gigli, Stefano Luperto and Antonio Tinto, and it features art from Miguel Coimbra.
Depending on player count, there will be two or more dungeon locations visible to the players, each offering two artifacts and an enchantment. The players each have their own identical deck of 10 minion cards. On your turn you can play cards from your hand to one or two dungeon locations, but your choice of whether to play two cards to the same location or one card to each, or whether to play a card face up or face down, affects whether or not you get to draw more cards to add to your hand. It's a simple mechanic that pushes players to an interesting decision dilemma: on the one hand, playing a card face down allows opportunities for bluffing and keeps your opponents guessing, but on the other hand, you're incentivised to play a card face up...
You don't actually battle until minion cards have been placed at all the available entrance sides of a dungeon tile. Any face-down cards are flipped so that all the cards are face up, and their text effects are resolved one by one, clockwise, starting with the card to the right of the tile's necromancer statue. These may well result in other cards being removed - so avoiding their effect if it hasn't already been activated. Remaining minions are rewarded with a gem, the active player takes the dungeon's enchantment token, and then the strength of players' remaining cards are compared - with the artifacts awarded to the two players with the strongest minions, tho' if all the remaining minions belong to just one player then that player gets to take both artifacts.
Players score at the end of the game for artifacts (3-7 points), enchantments (1 point) and sets of different coloured gems (1-12 points), tho' some gems carry the necromancer's curse and will cost you negative points.
Tho' Wizards & Co plays quickly and gameplay is quite straightforward, we've been pleasantly surprised by this game's depth. Some locations are best avoided because they carry cursed gems but canny cardplay can avoid negative effects. Sinister Fish have maximised replayability by offering options for different combinations of minion cards. You can also play with or without enchantment and artifact effects; so, for example, equipment artifacts can be played on one of your minion cards to enhance its strength. You'll find these all add to the 'take that' cut & thrust of the game but without adding undue complexity. It means that Wizards & Co is very playable as a family game, tho' it could be made just a jot more accessible if there was a visual key on the back of the rulebook that helped to decode the card and tile iconography.