SpellBook

2-4 players | Ages 12+ | 45 minutes
Publisher: Space Cowboys, 2023
Art: Cyrille Bertin

In SpellBook, each player, accompanied by a familiar, possesses a grimoire and collects materia to master spells and feed their familiar. The game provides pre-drawn spell sets for use in the early rounds, but soon players start drawing spells randomly or create their own spell combinations that are common to all players. Each spell combination gives an effect that lasts the rest of the game, and the more ingenious the combination, the more powerful the effect. As the rounds progress, the game becomes a different experience every time, with more than 2,100 spell combinations being possible.

SpellBook began as a simple card game. My design goal was to create “rummy with special powers”. Each time you played a set of cards down, it would grant you some special ability for the rest of the game. So as time went on you got more and more powerful at drawing, finding, and playing cards. I came up with enough powers to make the game modular - you can choose which 7 card types you’d like to play with. During development with Space Cowboys, the cards became more tactile acrylic ‘materia’ tokens, and Cyrille Bertin’s artwork is astonishing!

Links
➚ SpellBook at BoardGameGeek