What happens when multiple covens of witches come together to determine which among them is most powerful? Why, chase victory points, of course! Stefano Di Silvio’s Evenfall won’t be winning any points for originality. Its best bits are mined wholesale from other tableau- and combo-builders. But it’s a slick package all the same, even if it seems to cast an enchantment of forgetfulness after each appearance on the table.

That is a witch. Not a nun.

Okay, so you’re heading a coven of witches. Did I mention that already? Like I said, Evenfall doesn’t stick in the memory.

Like all covens of witches, your principal occupation is using sites of power to generate potions, herbs, and grimoires, which in turn are transformed into magical rituals, magical specialists, and magical magisters worth a bunch of endgame points.

So far, so very boilerplate. What sets Evenfall apart is its willingness to attach each of those steps to something more robust. Take sites of power. Ever since the population boom, untapped leylines are in short supply. To claim a site, it takes one of your witches visiting the shared board in the center of the table. Sometimes two witches, if the site in question is especially potent. This puts you in a hurry to claim the best locations before any rival covens.

That’s not all. Once claimed, sites of power can be used to generate income. Just the usual stuff, cards and herbs and maybe some mana. Do witches use mana? Sure they do. But there are two potential spots for your sites. At first they’re placed near the top half of your player board. This is your outer circle, where sites can be harvested and have rituals attached to them. Over time, you’ll want to move them down into your inner circle. This strips them of their ability to be harvested, but makes them worth points at the end of the game.

That’s not all. Sites in your inner circle can also be visited by your coven elders. This is a worker-placement game, at least in part. But while your ordinary witches are eager to venture out into the world to claim sites of power or gather resources or whatnot, elders prefer to remain snug within the inner circle. Hence, rituals that offer new actions must be moved to the bottom half of your board before your elders will deign to visit them. The worker placement is two-pronged, and it takes careful timing to determine when and where a site should be placed.

That’s not all. While pairings of rituals and sites are your bread and butter, specialists let you bend the rules or earn dollops of points at once. And there are special tokens called catalysts that can be attached to those rituals to either improve your income or your coven for little perks. And the capstone of each round features a battle between all three covens. Everybody checks the witches they’ve sent out into the world, bids some mana, and maybe comes away with a special stone that can double the points of one of your rituals when the game ends.

Those are witches. Not gnomes.

That’s… all, I think. There’s a lot on Evenfall’s mind. So much that it tends toward forgetfulness. And not only as a shtick, but also in the sense that it’s easy to get lost while reading through all those myriad card effects.

To its credit, everything coheres. Deployed witches bring home resources and sites, but also stick around to duke it out with rival covens. Resources are gained in three or four ways, but are readily spent on incoming rituals and specialists. As a set of rules, it’s perfectly smooth.

Where it gets dense is in the wide selection of cards and how they trigger off one another. There are dozens of rituals, some of which bend the in-game reality sufficiently to give an impression of otherworldly power. Take, for example, the Summoning Circle ritual. This lets you use a witch and spend two grimoires to play another ritual. In a game when rituals can easily cost five or six resources, that’s a steal. Doubly so if you trigger it with one of those lazy-bones elders instead of a more energetic witch. Or there’s Spatial Distortion, a mundane little thing at first glance, but one that can be bought with mana rather than herbs and potions, and which can double the income value of a site. Double it twice. Or there’s the Gate to Hell, which lets you advance on your coven track and double the reward. With the right timing, one can vault along the victory track or drag multiple sites into their inner circle, no problem.

Before long, you’re drowning in special actions, keywords, triggers, and extra cards. Evenfall is nothing if not generous. It’s very much about plumbing powerful combos out of the draw pile, only to realize those powerful combos are so thick on the ground that you’re practically tripping over them. As a consequence, sessions are noisy with “Oh, wait, I think I forgot to give myself two points” and “Oh, wait, I didn’t activate Twin Scythes a second time” and “Oh, wait, I’m visiting my Chameleon Doll, everybody hurry and read me their rituals real quick so I can use one of them.” It’s more than a little redolent of Tom Lehmann’s Res Arcana, but busier and longer.

Getting more witchy.

That proximity is also the source of my reservations. While Evenfall is slick, it struggles to set itself apart from other titles like Res Arcana, Elysium, 51st State and Imperial Settlers, Wingspan and Wyrmspan, among plenty of others. Its identity is largely built around piling more atop the heaps it inherited from other games, resulting in an experience that feels like sieving the important bits from the cruft. After all the combos have been assembled, it’s a lot of fuss to generate a steady trickle of points.

At times, that trickle becomes disappointing. While some rituals are exciting, many others exist to churn out a few points. Paradoxically, its resource conversion leans so far onto the permissive side of the line, with multiple spots letting you exchange any resource for any others, that various moves feel samey and unimportant. Despite its many cards and some truly lovely illustrations, wrapping up a session has a somniferous effect, like driving through a fog for ninety minutes only to be asked about the scenery. Apart from a few standouts — all having to do with the game’s four factions — I couldn’t tell you what distinguished one session from another. It’s all a haze.

Perhaps that’s an unfair criticism. It’s a rare tableau-builder that leaves a lasting impression. Except, well, there are some that do. Its closest touchstone, Res Arcana, uses its array of tiles, the familiarly-named places of power, along with monuments to add distinction to the back half of its matches. Wyrmspan and 51st State use a huge number of unique cards to lend their tableaux a sense of place, whereas Evenfall’s deck is packed with duplicates. It squats in an uncomfortable middle between having too many cards in the deck and too few unique options.

Got a coven in the oven.

I don’t want to oversell my nitpicks. On the whole, Evenfall is good. But it isn’t remarkable. It doesn’t demand to be replayed, to be explored. It doesn’t get people talking excitedly or pointing out the cool things they built. When the contest is finished, these covens slip back into darkness, ready to harangue Puritan settlers with small temptations. Only instead of the taste of butter, the best it’s got is some warm margarine.

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A complimentary copy was provided.