Some more news on the game formerly known as Wiccage! For starters, I’m going to rename it: leading contenders are “The Fox, The Witch, and the Mirror” or “Foxes in the Forest”. I’d like to really lean into the idea of a fairy tale setting for the game, and these names really seem to suit the game. I’m going to leave the tag here for now.

Second big thing is that I’m working with somebody who has suggested a variant. If you’ve tried the game, I’d love to get your opinion on which set of rules you prefer. The new rules are modified as follows:

• When dealing, deal 12 cards to each player. Ignore all references to Draft cards in the rules. Place the extra 6 cards to the side, we’re calling that the Vault for now.
• A few of the cards need small changes:
  • The 1s, ignore the reference to draft order.
  • 3s can now switch Trump with any card from your hand, not the draft cards.
  • 5s now work totally differently: Look at any two cards in the Vault, and you may exchange one card from your hand with one of them.
• The scoring is largely unchanged, but if there’s a tie for tricks or 7s, that point isn’t awarded.

This is mainly to test if this direction is fruitful. There are changes that I might want to do if this seems like a good idea, such as modifying the number of cards set aside, updating scoring, fiddling with some of the powers, etc, but I’d like to get people’s impressions of this basic idea versus the drafting one.

If you try this out, let me know!