Weirdwood Manor is a cooperative adventure game where you are needing to protect Weirdwood Manor and its leader, Lady Weirdwood, from invading Fae Monsters and his Clockwork Scarab minions. This is a game about gaining resources to upgrade your character to do more and more, making sure scarabs don’t do too much damage, until you defeat the monster. The game is for 1-5 players and takes 2 hours or more to play. It’s a higher complexity cooperative game published by Greyridge Games. This is their first design, but the Weirdwood IP has been used prior with some chapter books.
What’s in the Box?
- 2 dual layer main circle board
- 4 day corridor ring pieces
- 1 time of day corridor ring
- 13 outer room tiles
- 13 middle room tiles
- 6 inner room tiles
- 6 character boards
- 6 character action card decks with 13 cards in each
- 6 cardboard standees
- 5 player aids
- 5 pink tracking cubes for XP power track
- 5 orange tracking cubes for XP tactics track
- 3 far monster boards
- 20 Chaos Ogre cards
- 20 Min Wraith cards
- 20 Therus cards
- 3 cardboard standees
- 5 rubble/fire tiles
- 2 yellow room dice, d12, d6
- 8 balanced dice
- 10 attack dice
- 6 defense dice
- 1 Min Wraith Die
- 48 red tracking cubes
- 15 balances die cubes
- 10 defense die cubes
- 1 Lady Weirdwood cardboard standee
- 26 Warden Tactic cards
- 1 hit battle tracker token
- 1 block battle tracker token
- 1 group XP tracker token
- 25 power tokens
- 30 Min tokens
- 30 knowledge tokens
- 50 clockwork scarab tokens
- 18 companion cards
How’s It Play?
This is a cooperative game where you and others player face off against one of the 3 included monsters. Most of the time you are trying to save Lady Weirdwood, but with different monsters, your goal might be slightly different.
Players have cards to play each turn that you decide to play in 1 of 4 different slots indicating the time of day. Depending on the time of day slot that you played your card on, you move the inner ring on the map at least once, but turn it to match the time of day on that ring. You will need to be strategic with this because once the ring circles completely around, it causes the middle ring, the day ring to move. This is kinda like a timer for the game and you want to get everything done, or stay on track, before the timer ends. Moving rings in the game also changes entryways to different rooms, which is another reason you’ll need to be strategic with these choices.
Your card also has listed actions like move, fight, or gain resources. When you play your card, you activate those in any order or perform your player ability. At any time if you don’t want to play a card or can’t, you can place it face down to gain your choice of 1 movement, 1 fight, or 1 resource of your choice.
Players each have a player board with 3 tracks that help you improve your character, and as the game progresses you will slowly gain ways to boost magic, battling, and helping with warden tactics cards, which are ongoing benefits for the game. Cards also have half symbols on their sides that you can match up to gain other bonuses as long as those cards are placed out together.
Returning to the concept of taking actions, you can take them from your cards, from your character actions, and also room abilities when in a room with one. Room abilities are triggered if you end your movement in an empty room, or after fighting and you clear a room.
After a player takes an action, the monster has a turn. They advance the board and perform its listed action. Depending on the day ring, cards may be slotted in and trigger. Keep in mind that throughout the game, wou will be battling with the monster by rolling dice according to your skills.
Scarabs are placed throughout and move when activated, attempting to move to an outer room. When 2 scarabs are located in the same room, it causes that room to be flipped over. To flip the room back to its original position, you will need to be in that room, defeat them in battle, and pay the resources shown on that tile before flipping that room back over.
On top of all of this, you can also gain companions, which give you another slot to place cards and additional abilities.
You win the game if you complete one of the win conditions, and lose if any of the lose conditions are triggered. These vary depending on the monster you are facing off against, with a total of 3 included in the game.
The Verdict
Weirdwood Manor is based off of books, and you can find while playing the game that there is a story. There’s clearly a world here that has many different characters and the rooms have several different abilities to take advantage of based on that world. In short, there’s something special about this game – it’s not just thrown together.
Weirdwood Manor is trickier than you might anticipate. You’ll need to focus and figure things out, as there are multiple things going on at the same time. You need to be prepared for the game. This is not a game you would send to a friend to get them into board games, as it would be too much for them and over their heads. And even if you know complex games, because it’s so tricky, you may lose the first few times of playing the game.
But don’t let that dissuade you! It’s worth the effort to really dig in here. There are some great character abilities, and you can choose to play different ones each time you play, which changes the game substantially. There are recommended starting characters, but some with some very fun abilities you can choose to use when later knowing the game a little more than on your first play.
The biggest thing you’ll notice about Weirdwood Manor is that you have those rings that shift the open rooms. This is a very cool and neat idea that limits your movement and decisions at times. The placing of the cards was hard to plan for, depending on how much time you had between turns with others playing the game with you. But you could have someone be more flexible near the beginning of placing cards, though that means someone will most likely get stuck with moving that ring pretty far just because there are no other open slots to use.
The rulebook needs a little help. It’s hard to find what you are looking for to answer your questions. It really needs to be organized better, and then with this type of game needs some clarifications. It does a great job teaching the game at first, but you might find yourself constantly looking at it looking for answers. The game can run long, which I don’t usually mind, but it just makes it harder to get back to the table.
There’s a learning curve, you’ll want to pay attention to what works the first few times you play, and again, I warn you that you likely won’t win the first time around. I can recommend that you try to gain an extra fighting die whenever you can in the first or second round.
Overall, Weirdwood Manor has amazing components. The gimmick for the game with the shifted rings changing rooms, works for me, I love the idea. The art is great with a goofy plus spooky kind of look to it. Definitely a fan of the vibes, and it’s a great game if you’re looking to stick around for a while and work to figure it out.
Images via Greyridge Games
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