When the Witch Hunter bangs on my door to accuse me of paganism, I hope he won’t mind listening to some internal debate over whether that’s a suitable designation. I prefer to think of myself as a monolatrist, you see. Maybe a henotheist. I’m torn, really, over how to identify my relationship to these heathen deities that adorn my home. We don’t insist on labels like your mainstream god.

Pagan: Fate of Roanoke is positioned to ask such questions. Designed by Kasper Kjær Christiansen and Kåre Storgaard, Pagan places itself not only on the physical frontier, but also along the raggedy edge of our theological understanding. Only rather than debating the finer points of ecclesiastical law, two players are caught up in an existential debate over whether the colony should be forcibly stripped from the landscape via magic. That’s right, it’s a New World religious debate. No knowledge of Latin required!

The locals endure visit after visit from unwelcome guests.

The first thing to note about Pagan is that it fits in the overlap between two very different types of card games. On the left are your bespoke dueling games. Pagan has been built with a singular clash in mind, between Witch and Witch Hunter, both with their own considerations and card types and paths to victory. Yet in spite of their differences, these varied interests are intertwined. Every play not only advances your own position, but also touches your counterpart — and can be countered, removed, pushed back against. There’s a tale being told, one that’s tangible in a way most board game narratives don’t even bother attempting.

On the right side of things, however, Pagan is also curious about all those customizable card games you played as a kid. It doesn’t quite stoop to the level of blister boosters or having to duck into your friendly local game store to purchase a card from a drawer, but it still niggles about broader card pools and increased villager options. There are a few expansions available, each whispering that they’ll fulfill the promise, like some new-age version of Netrunner. But it never quite gets there. Even after a diet of new cards, Pagan is a stomach that is never fully satiated.

What a stomach it is, though. The core gameplay loop is bewitching. Every game opens with nine villagers in a line. These are the notable figures of Roanoke, the colony on the verge of vanishing from the world. Each villager offers their own action: drawing cards, playing cards, earning “influence,” first and foremost among the game’s myriad resources. Every turn allows your character to place three pawns on the table, some or all of which will visit these villagers to both trigger their personal action and sow your interests among them. As you accumulate tokens on these villagers, the efficacy and spread of your actions increases. The Witch, for example, eventually doubles the potency of her visitee’s actions, while the Witch Hunter eventually exonerates or executes them.

It’s a worker placement game, then, but one with a few tricks up its sleeve. First is the villager composition itself. I mentioned there are nine in total, but after a few exploratory plays one might consider which villagers should be included in any given match altogether. There’s a clever tournament-style system at play, wherein the Witch picks the first set of three, the Witch hunter picks another, and the third is selected via whichever scenario you’re currently playing. The thinking is that both sides are able to select villagers that mesh well with their style of play, while still needing to maneuver around those selected by their opponent.

Meanwhile, the identity of those nine villagers is all-consuming not only because they offer a wide range of benefits, but also because one of them is the Witch. When the game begins, the Witch draws a random card that designates which identity she’s assumed. That pile of cards then becomes the source of the Witch Hunter’s exonerations, a slow trickle of information about who the Witch is not.

Both sides have their own card types to leverage.

What a setup. There aren’t many like it. Nor is there any card game quite like it. I invoked Netrunner earlier. At times, the comparison is apt. Like that game’s contest between Corps and Runners, Pagan leans into its sense of identity. When playing as the Witch, you’re fully invested in the role. You duck and hide, you sow doubts, you try to lead your pursuer on a wild goose chase. The Witch Hunter, meanwhile, surveys the board like a grand inquisitor trying to ferret out sin. Everyone is a suspect. It would have been one thing to parrot Netrunner’s success, but the roles in Pagan manage to stand apart on their own.

Take the Witch. She’s all about building toward explosive turns. One of her three pawns is a familiar, which can trigger a special power. Now she isn’t merely visiting the locals; she’s also henpecking at her rival’s clues or unleashing surprising amounts of power around certain households. On its own this might prove effectual enough, but she can also cast enchantments that stick around from one round to the next, hindering her pursuer until he gets around to dispelling them. Most impressive, though, is her ability to brew potions. These take some time to percolate, but can be quaffed as a free action, transforming her into… well, into a whole range of things. Perhaps every one of her pawns will become a familiar. Perhaps she’ll draw a bunch of cards. Perhaps she’ll influence every villager on the board at once.

The Witch Hunter, on the other hand, marches inexorably forward with steel-toed boots, preferring steady turns that prohibit the Witch’s movements little by little. He gathers allies to modify his actions or deploys locations that provide new actions altogether — with the tradeoff that by sticking to his own destinations he surrenders some control over the villagers, thereby granting the Witch free rein over where to visit. To smother his quarry’s newfound freedom, he can also seed the village with little edicts that penalize the Witch’s placements or reward his own. The Witch is still free to visit anyone she likes, but now she risks giving the Hunter a bunch of resources, or she can’t take that villager’s action, or whatever.

What works so well about these identities is that they aren’t merely asymmetrical cards; they’re entirely different outlooks. The Witch is organic, always changing, difficult to pin down. She’ll go through three or four small turns, each unimpressive on its own, only to unleash a turn that accomplishes more than the previous handful combined. By contrast, the Witch Hunter is methodical. He steadily improves his actions, blocks off portions of the village, and gradually clears one villager after the other.

He’s also something of a bummer to play.

Weighing the evidence.

I don’t like to comment on balance. Not only is balance overrated, but worse, nobody can agree on what it looks like. It doesn’t help that every time I mention that such-and-such faction might be underpowered, some guy comes along to insist that his dog always wins with that faction, so take that. All we have are anecdotes and vibes.

So when I say that I’ve never seen the Witch Hunter win, take that with a grain of salt. It doesn’t matter how many sessions we played, or that we split our plays between Witch and Witch Hunter, or that we eventually tried our hands at deck construction and villager selection. It doesn’t matter that we were loving everything about Pagan until our appreciation for the game curdled over perceived balance issues.

What matters is that the Witch Hunter’s slow-and-steady approach doesn’t hit the same emotional highs as the Witch’s brews, enchantments, and familiars. Pagan is a game of deduction as much as it’s a game of deck management and worker placement, but its tools for deduction aren’t weighty. The Witch Hunter has two main tools: exoneration and observation. In the first case, working through the stack of innocent villagers takes time that the Hunter may not have; in the latter, the Witch can reliably spread around her corruption in such a way that the Witch Hunter is left with a fifty-fifty shot, at best, before she unleashes her final spell.

Of course, this is a simplified statement. There’s board position to consider. Because pawns block villagers, it isn’t always possible to stack tokens in the right places. And there are quite a few card effects that alter the course of the game. The Witch Hunter needs to go on the offensive and do everything possible to disrupt the Witch’s access to both the villagers and any resources.

Even then, however, despite excellent play in the moment and some truly formidable narrative cohesion, Pagan never feels entirely complete. The jankiness of its balance aside, it yearns for stronger deck construction, for a better pool of cards, for a few nips and tucks around the edges. As we played our final session — one that yet again favored the Witch and proved dissatisfying in its last stages — the thought occurred to me that Pagan is a game that deserves to be remade a decade or two down the road.

More visits.

Because despite its problems, Pagan is special. Like some of its peers — Netrunner springs to mind — there’s so much here that works, including an interplay between Witch and Witch Hunter that leaves both players sweating over which trap will clamp shut next. It’s the ludic equivalent of a prickle down your spine as you await a sharp jab between the shoulder blades.

Sadly, its tendons can’t quite bear the weight of all that muscle. For now, Pagan provides a better first impression than a second look. Or a third. Or a fourth. With every play, it reveals new problems. The prickle becomes a throb, then an ache. I sincerely hope that this isn’t the end for Pagan. But for me, until it gets a serious revamping, I won’t be pounding on any villagers’ doors to debate the finer points of heresy anytime soon.

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