Harrow County, the second title from Off the Page Games, lends itself to a parable. Like its predecessor, Mind MGMT, there’s an act of evocation going on here, a summoning ritual meant to call to mind the comic book by Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook. But somewhere along the way, the mixture grew too saturated. Whatever ingredients were put into this moonshine, they swelled up and eventually burst the mason jars that contained them. It’s a reminder that good game design is often about subtracting everything that doesn’t fit.

What would have comfortably fit into Harrow County hovers at roughly seventy percent of what the game gives us.

Your average rural population.

To be fair to Jay Cormier and Shad Miller, both talented designers, great efforts have gone into compressing those ingredients into a more digestible format. Harrow County must be learned in stages. To my weathered mind, perhaps there are too many chapters in the rulebook, each one too incremental, too untrusting in the capacities of its players — but whatever. The point stands. First you learn two of the factions, and only in a pared-down form. Later you’ll add new ideas, new characters, new wrinkles to the game’s action-selection system. Eventually, only after you’ve either committed to learning this thing fully or thrown up your hands in surrender, does it bother to teach you its greatest secrets.

Somewhat like being initiated into some eldritch coven, perhaps. At least the metaphor suits the setting. For the bulk of its duration, this is a purely two-player game about asymmetric factions vying for control of the titular county. There are three to consider. The Protectors are the obvious good folk, a standing that’s reflected in their special objective. While everybody has a few shared methods for earning points — slaying enemy haints, occupying the deadly brambles at the center of the map — each faction also produces a method of their own. The Protectors’ is that they’re tasked with escorting the valley’s civilians to safety, using their bodies, special roads, and often magic to escort everyone home.

The others aren’t so benevolent. The Family is the most directly malicious. They fill up the board with storms, hexagonal frames that mark spaces as difficult to traverse. (These are absolutely lovely to look at, by the way; the production is marvelous.) By daisy-chaining these storms between their starting space and any civilian homesteads, they burn the things to the ground. A few chapters later, players are introduced to Kammi, an aristocratic witch who has hidden away her soul in a doll. She embarks on a quest to recover the artifact, hunting for its hiding place on the opposite side of the map. Like everything else in Harrow County, her rivals are hardly going to make the search easy on her. Her opposing player can swiftly turn the hunt into a shell game, squirreling away the doll in advance of her approach.

And lest you think that victory conditions are the sum total of the asymmetry here, ’tisn’t so. Each faction also has its own method for resolving their basic actions, differing in how they act, upgrade, play cards, and use magic. It’s a lot to take in.

Breakin’ jars and feedin’ on haints.

Too much, in fact. Consider the action-selection system. On your turn, you break a mason jar. There are four per player, each offering its own option. One of them lets you take your basic actions — and again, these are different for each faction. Another lets you take wild actions, an initially flimsy option that gradually becomes more potent as it’s taken multiple times over the course of the session. There’s a jar for battle, the only one that can be used repeatedly. Lastly, you can spend a turn casting magic and using your character’s special abilities.

In the full game, these go from a fairly boilerplate method for choosing what you’ll do on your turn to an act of brinkmanship in their own right. That’s thanks to a row of special tiles arrayed between you and your opponent’s mason jars. Whichever one of you takes a particular action first also gets the corresponding bonus. This encourages players to mix it up now and then.

At the same time, it adds another layer to the proceedings. At any given time, you’re assessing (1) your own (unique) actions and objectives, (2) how to stymie your rival’s (unique) actions and objectives, and (3) how to come out on top of the bonuses in the mason jar-breaking minigame.

In isolation, this all sounds pretty nifty! The problem isn’t that Harrow County is complex; rather, the issue is that Harrow County is complex for so very few returns. In the game’s early chapters, it’s easy to see some glimpse of what this thing might eventually shape into. It’s baroque, full of weird little movement rules and arcane symbols that don’t always quite communicate their intentions. It’s gothic, laden with all those factions and their myriad characters and cards. It’s also fast — too fast. So fast that the game ends as abruptly as it begins, intruding like a hiccup in a church meeting. So fast that it never really warrants all those rules, never mind the absolute madness of trying to reference anything in a rulebook that’s structured with such hostility.

The result is a chase that never quite resolves. Chapter after chapter, you pursue the fleeting shadow of what Harrow County might become, only for it to disappear round the next corner. Maybe the next chapter will bump up the victory point threshold to make the game’s conclusion less jarring. Maybe the next faction won’t feel so stunted. Maybe the final chapter’s addition of a third player will make the experience fuller, like you’re playing the actual game this time.

Well. Sorta. But not in a redeeming way.

Hester is the most interesting faction by a county mile.

At long last, in its final chapter, Harrow County introduces Hester. She’s a witch. A different witch. Look, it’s witches all the way down, but she’s the angriest witch of them all. In the fiction, Hester was murdered decades ago. Now she’s coming back to terrorize everybody. Near as I can tell, she’s that kid from The Ring. And she can only be played as a third wheel, stomping around the board while two other players try to rescue villagers or recover their soul.

It’s a cool idea even if it requires an inordinate amount of homework. A mode that requires three people even when much of the game’s duration has been limited to two players… well, that’s a decision. But what’s past is past. Hester is here. What now?

Now Hester toys with her food. While two people play a straightforward match, Hester pops into the mix to take over their haints, block off portions of the map with impassable bonfires, and sometimes manifest in the corporeal realm to bite off chunks of their flesh.

Much of this gameplay is disconnected from the usual course of action. No broken mason jars for her. Instead, she intrudes onto the map with creeping roots, gathering cubes that accord with the terrain. Like everyone else, she tosses those cubes into the tree — the game’s cube tower and method for jumbling up its numbers, another nice touch — but rather than fighting battles, she spends them to infect the other players’ haints. This is done by sticking snakes in their ears. As in, she jams an actual molded snake into the actual hole in the side of each haint’s actual head. Again, this is absolutely lovely in terms of the game’s production, and always earns a laugh the first time it happens. After a while, Hester mashes together two infected haints to form a bonfire, where she can then birth herself onto the map. Then she barrels screaming toward the nearest bystander, chows down on a portion of their power, and disappears until she musters the power to manifest again.

It’s wild. It’s metal. It’s hysterical. It’s fun as hell.

It’s also a total drag for those other two players. Hester isn’t unstoppable. You can attack her bonfires to rob her of spots to incorporate into the physical world, and it isn’t like you’re going to spend much effort protecting haints that have snakes in their ears. But while you’re carefully positioning your haints and taking care to break the right mason jars and trying to prioritize useful upgrades and hoarding potent power cards, Hester is having the time of her life kicking over everybody’s sand castles.

I’ll put a worm in yer ear!

This imbalance speaks to the problems with Harrow County as a whole. Because there’s too much stuff in here. Too many pieces. Too many setup instructions spread across too many chapters. Too many exceptions to too many rules. Too many considerations for a game that will end with all the ceremony of a decapitation. Too many systems, too many of which feel like they were shoehorned into the design to solve some previous problem.

And, in the end, at the height of its power, when its symbology has been mastered and everybody at last understands how to play… it features too many players. Hester is a delight, a red-toothed bully who strides into somebody else’s duel and starts swinging. But unlike other asymmetrical games, which strive to provide space for everybody, Harrow County becomes too crowded. Everybody is locked in here with Hester. And being locked in with Hester is no fun at all. After all the work necessary to bring her into the game, her addition showcases just how burdened and impotent everybody else feels to play.

What a bewildering game. There is such potential here. But it’s too much for too little. Harrow County overflows with ideas. That’s precisely its problem. Everybody has ideas. The trick lies in learning how to bottle them.

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A complimentary copy was provided.