It’s time to finish your degree at the Academy of the Dark Arts! You’ll need to earn enough credits to graduate by completing various projects, and your thesis. Will your projects be impressive enough to earn you the first in class spot? Let’s find out!

What Is It?

Push-You-Luck Style Drafting – Players can look at piles of material cards as an action and choose to take what they find into hand, or try the next pile in hopes of finding something better

Multi-Use Cards / Hand Management – Players will use those material cards to both purchase new projects and stock (with the dollar value at the bottom of the card) as well as to commit to the completion of their current projects

Contracts – Players will complete projects mainly for points, but also to get some abilities that will help them throughout the game

Who Is It For?

  • 1 to 4 Players – Solo plays against a robot opponent which takes actions based on grave deck card flips. I think solo works fine, but I prefer multiplayer, and I think it’s best at 2
  • Ages 12 & Up – Pretty light ruleset, all about knowing the different actions and understanding your best action choice each turn. I’d say it’s pretty approachable for younger or newer players
  • Fans of push your luck drafting, contract completion, and multi-use cards
  • Fans of the dark arts/sorcery theme

Variants

Mission Mode – Solo or multiplayer. Play a series of games, trying to meet a certain criteria. After each game, if a player meets the criteria, they move on to the next mission. If they don’t, they’ll have to attempt the same one again (like in Phase 10) – It’s neat if you like the game enough to play a few times in a row. I think for me, it’s a little too long, so I would only want to play it once or twice as-is. But, it’s a fun option for solo to give you an added challenge

PROS

  • Aesthetics – The art is simple but I think it really works with the theme, and looks nice
  • Components – Mostly cards, but they’re good quality. Love the 1st player token. The few cardboard chits are decent too
  • Good variety of projects / abilities – can have different strategies depending on what comes out each game
  • Theme is fun and works alongside the mechanics
  • I like the way the higher tier projects transition into the game throughout the different rounds

CONS

  • Can run a bit long for what it is
  • Luck of the cards, especially with the added pushing your luck for the materials
  • Some project abilities can only be used during certain moon phases, which can be kind of annoying to time, and players seemed more likely to miss out on those

Final Thoughts

Timing is everything in this game. You only get 1 action per turn, but sometimes you really want to do a few, or you just want to make sure that doing one action this turn doesn’t hurt what you’re able to do the next turn (going back to the abilities that can only be used some of the time).

It’s definitely a balancing game because of how valuable materials are, being used as both money and pieces of your projects, and it seems like it can be really important to purchase things a bit earlier in the game so that you can focus on stocking up on more materials later in the game…but at the same time later projects are usually worth more credits so they’ll help you win!

Because of the decision space the game does offer, I do think it can run a little long, so I prefer it at 2 players personally. That aside, the game isn’t super unique mechanically, but I do like the theme and overall I think all the pieces work well together. If you like these mechanisms, it’s worth a play!

Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 7/10

Designer – Chris Glein
Artists – Chris Glein, Katie Khau
Publisher – Weird Giraffe Games
MSRP – $29.00
Website

*I was provided a copy of this game to do this review*

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