Magical Friends – First Impressions
Blossoming fruit trees, music, and a full marketplace. This can only mean one thing: The Midsommar Festival is just around the corner! And with it, this year‘s Midsommar competition! On a poster, you read the shiny letters: “Whoever brings the most friends to the festival wins the grand prize!“
No doubt about it. This time, that grand prize will be yours, and you already have an idea of how to get those friends. Your colleagues are also in suspiciously good spirits. You must have not been the only magician to come up with such a brilliant idea!
Unpack the summoning spells, let the competition begin!
What happens when the tower doesn’t want to defend itself? What if it’s just a lovely tavern with some good drinks? What if the ones trying to get to the tavern are all busy fighting each other? Like some manic conga line of magical death and harried running.
Well, it wouldn’t really be a tower-defense game anymore. It’d be a defend-yourself-while-running-at-breakneck-speed-for-the-tavern. Or tavern-defense? Somewhere along those lines.
Anywho, Magical Friends and How to Summon Them is a game of clever movement and fluid strategy from designer Klemens Luger, with are from Hannah Flattinger and Tran Khiet Van Ho. It’s a fantasy game in which players summon magical creatures and ferry them toward the tavern on the other side of the board. Good, evil, and neutral creatures alike make for the tavern and the boisterous good time that awaits them there. It’s a sanctuary for all of them, but the path between is laden with danger!
What It Does
In a game of Magical Friends, players are mages tasked with a difficult challenge: summon creatures and guide them safely to the tavern. Big or small, flying or not, good or evil, these creatures must survive the treacherous paths to the tavern and find refuge in it. Once there, they cannot be hurt. But the journey there? Perilous and full of opportunity for competing mages to slay these creatures before they finish the trek.
The mages summon the creatures. Then they urge them onward, deciding which branching paths to follow. All of the creatures have different abilities and ways to help the mage who summoned them or hurt the mages who they oppose. In addition to the powers that creatures contribute, they also determine the range of movement that a mage’s collection of creatures can expend on any given turn.
The winner will be the player who delivers the most creatures safely to the tavern at the end of eight rounds. Traversing the right paths, utilizing the best spaces, and creating unique combinations among the skills of summoned creatures is the winning strategy.
With reversible tiles, a large number of unique creatures, and other influential game mechanisms, Magical Friends has the potential to engage you and your group with some fantastical choices. Summon the creatures, bring them to the tavern, and make sure the other mages’ mythical companions never make the trip…
How It Does It
I likened the game to the tower-defense genre because of how movement in the game functions. Creatures are summoned at an origin point and then move along one of several paths to an endpoint. Sometimes they will die along the way before the journey is complete. But if they make it to the tavern, then they’ve survived. Instead of a static defense or growing opposition from the endpoint, though, the threats in the game all come from the other players. The other travelers along the road don’t want your creatures to make it to the tavern and they will work to prevent that just as intensely as the attacking elements in a tower-defense game.
Before ever getting onto the board, though, players have to resolve rounds of bidding and drafting. Each player gets a hand of artifact cards at the beginning of the game, numbered 1 to 11. Those cards are the limited reserve of bidding power that each player possesses. In rotating turn order, players bid one of those artifact cards, with no number allowed to be repeated. Then in order from highest to lowest, players draft creatures from the queue. Higher artifact cards give players a better chance at first dibs when looking at the creature queue. Lower cards will likely leave players in a lower position for drafting but those artifact cards usually give some bonus to movement, spellcasting, or other actions. Once the drafting order has been determined, players will take turns selecting creatures from the queue until every player has gone.
Player order can be very important because when a player drafts a creature, they immediately summon them and use their movement score to advance their creatures along the paths and perform actions. What a player does on their turn could greatly affect the status of another player’s creatures or the state of the board. So it’s essential for players to recognize when they can sacrifice a good position in turn order without suffering too much on the board.
Other than the bidding, drafting, and movement resolution, there are also creature abilities and special effect cards that can influence how the game functions. Creatures can slay each other, fully removing pieces from the board and damaging the scoring potential of a player. They can fly and move faster. Or throw other creatures. Or boost movement. There are many strategies available for players to exploit. And the special effect cards increase movement and enable players to make some strong combinations on their turns.
All of these options must be considered in order to maximize your chances of survival in Magical Friends.
Why You Might Like It
There is a subtle amount of strategy that hides beneath the surface of the game. Creature’s affiliation with good or evil. Magical spells that need spell power to activate. The value of certain paths and the spaces they contain. When to compete for turn order versus when to save artifact cards.
While the overall aim of the game can be violent in terms of slaying other creatures, the fantasy aesthetic somewhat sterilizes the action, meaning that you could play this game with younger or more sensitive players and it doesn’t come across as a brutish experience. Also, the artwork itself is very unique and might be appealing to a lot of players.
Why You Might Not
Sometimes the creature queue can adversely influence how your turn goes, with new creatures being revealed as players take their turns so very strong creatures that a player didn’t anticipate could make their way into the game by the end of the round. That can negatively impact the strategy a player attempts to build.
Some tactics—like building a catapult when it’s avaiable—seem essential which could lessen the overall potential for varied strategies when playing the game numerous times. It would take several plays to see how this affects the experience in the long term.
Final Thoughts
There is a lot to like here. Ushering your creatures safely across the map feels tense as your opponents summon strong creatures to counter your abilities. The flying Vampire can only be killed by good creatures. The Lovecraftian Old Friend ends the game if it makes it to the tavern. The Skeletons and Gnomes spawn in groups so you can score multiple times. The Hellhound pursues good creatures in its path. There are so many different abilities to account for every turn and it’s a nice spatial puzzle to decipher.
It will be interesting to see the longevity of the game and how players feel after four or five plays versus the first one, but I’ve felt engaged every time I’ve played so far at two and three players. The terrain has been uniquely valuable to different creatures and I haven’t necessarily approached my movement the same each game.
That variability will be valuable as players explore what Magical Friends has to offer. I’m excited to see what Klemens and his team reveal during the Kickstarter campaign and how the game continues to evolve as it’s presented to potential backers.
For now, I feel like the game does a great job of giving players meaningful decisions on their turn when assessing how best to proceed. Sacrifice a high artifact card and claim an early position in the turn order or go for more powerful moves with a lower artifact card while risking what creatures might be available after other players go. It’s all a toss-up and I imagine other players will enjoy the process of sifting through those gameplay decisions.
A good start and hopefully more on the way!
If you want to check out Magical Friends, you can learn more about it here or read what the community thinks on BoardGameGeek.
Tracking player movement around the board is an interesting mechanism and the ways that players can manipulate that during each game of Magical Friends is pretty cool!
Let us know in the comments and give a recommendation for other games of which to share our first impressions.