Wizards Cup
- Board's Eye View
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Designed by Seiji Kanai, with art by Yamamori, Wizards Cup is a small-box two-player duelling card game. It's published by Jelly Jelly Games, La Boite de Jeu and Hachette Boardgames UK.
Each player has an identical deck of 18 cards. The cards show a magic power, its associated element and a numerical value. At the start of the game, each player nominates one card that their opponent has to include among the six cards with which they'll play. Players each then choose the other five cards they'll use. Players each set aside one card from these six cards to place in a waiting area where the card may or may not be subsequently be activated, depending on the other cards used in the game.
Players then order the five cards with which they'll be duelling; essentially programming their hand. The top cards are simultaneously revealed and they are resolved to determine which is the winner and which is defeated and moved to the top of its owner's discard pile. Cards are resolved first by magic power (text on the card, where relevant), then by element (following a kind of rock/scissors/paper hierarchy) and, finally (if neither the magic power of element has eliminated a card) by comparing numerical values. Of the 18 cards in each player's deck, eight bear the 'void' element icon - meaning they are unaffected by the hierarchy of the other elements. It's possible for both cards to be defeated (so both moved to the top of their owners' discard piles) but in most instances there will be one wizard card left standing and the player whose card was defeated flips their next card to pit them against the wizard card previously left standing.
With a playing 'hand' of just five cards apiece, rounds are a super-quick series of Top Trumps-style duels. You start off with knowledge of just one card that you know will either be among the five cards with which your opponent will be playing or which they've placed as their 'waiting' card. That knowledge might inform your own choice of cards... There are tactical decisions to be taken over the order in which you program your cards. It might at first seem best to play a powerful card upfront in the hope that your opponent's cards will each be defeated by it one after the other. On the other hand, many of the magic powers deliver a benefit when they are at the top of a player's discard pile, so an alternative tactic might be to lose an early duel so that you have a discard-pile power available to you on subsequent duels.
However you play, Wizards Cup is a super-quick game that you can expect to play in just 10 minutes. At the end of a round, players get to swap out just one of their six cards for one of the 12 other cards in their deck; so you have a very limited opportunity to modify your deck to take account of the cards your opponent is using. The game is won by the best of three rounds. That obviously could mean that the third round is the decider but in our plays at Board's Eye View, the player who won the first round more often than not was able to secure a win on the second round.