Pagan: Fate of Roanoke

Picked up a copy of Pagan because it seemed like the perfect game to explore with the TaoLing. I hadn’t exactly watched some of the Heavy Cardboard streams¹ but it was an intriguing idea. A two player Living Card Game (ish) — a deckbuilding game but with no random card packs. On top of that a worker placement game. The theme is witch vs witch hunter. There are 9 suspects, who are also the places where the witch and witch hunter will take most of their actions — each suspect will let you get some influence (which you spend to play cards), or draw card(s) or play card(s). Each side can also accumulate “stuff” on each worker (suspicion and favors for the witch, clues for the hunter).

The witch needs to get enough favors on the “true witch” (him/herself, based on a card that is drawn at the start of the game) to cast a ritual to win. The Hunter needs to kill the true witch to win OR exonerate all the non-witches: by turning clues into evidence the hunter can draw a card from the suspect deck and determine a random suspect is innocent. But if things are going poorly and the Hunter has enough clues, he can simply kill a suspect. But killing three innocents results on a loss (and even killing one will result in the surviving suspects withdrawing all their support).

Our Games

We played Scenario #1 — Which lowers all the numbers to make the game faster (and uses 30 card decks instead of 50 card decks) and …. well …. our thoughts were the most active strategy thread on BGG titled “Winning with the Witch: Is it even possible?”

Now in our defense, the witch won 2/3rds of our games. BUT … in one of them the witch said “Well, that’s it” thinking she had a lock on her next turn; but a heretofore unseen card broke the lock and based on the clue the hunter could guess the witch. The next game the hunter put the witch into a figurative vise, making sure that no win could possibly occur during the endgame and exonerating one person a turn in the process.

The issue is that the hunter can put out investigations placed beside a suspect. When one player visits the suspect, the hunter gets a bonus (or the witch suffers a penalty). The witch can play enchantments, cards that permanently help the witch. Fair enough.

But the hunter has a built in action to remove an enchantment, and it always costs less to remove than to place. The witch needs a special card to tinker with investigations. The game’s defenders say “Well, the Hunters special action doesn’t generate clues, while the witch got suspicion for placing the enchantment, so it balances” and for all I know they are correct, but it did not feel that way in our game.

Switching sides, in our third game the witch (having seen the vise grip develop) rushed with a bit more urgency and eventually took her shot — setting up victory conditions on two characters at once, hoping that the hunter (who had exonerated 5/8ths of the innocents) would a) not have exonerated the patsy and b) not be able to completely block both from completing the ritual and c) block the wrong one. It was hard to estimate b), but this probably was at best a 5/16th shot at victory, and probably closer to a 1/5 shot.

In fact the parlay happened and the Witch emerged victorious …but in our After Action we noticed a way for the Hunter to block both suspects that was overlooked. That’s when I found that thread.

Now — these were the basic scenarios (where it only takes 1 piece of evidence to exonerate instead of 3, and the Witch only needs two favors to cast the ritual, instead of 3) but the lock down against the witch seems like it would work the same. But we’ll see.

It may be that some of the expansions add cards that fix some of the balance issues (assuming there are).

Reflections

• Will definitely be playing a few more games, and probably buying at least one expansion. Apart from adding more cards and introducing deck building, the expansion adds more suspects (who presumably have slightly different abilities) and scenarios (with minor rules changes). Presumably one of them will work really well.
• The deckbuilding is “50 cards, two copies of each card” and “at least 10 of each type of card” (and both sides have four types. For the intro scenario it was 30 cards (15×2) and it seems like the Hunter’s 30 card deck may be much stronger in general than the Witch’s.
• Apart from the “gain influence/draw/play” each suspect also lets you put (suspicion/clues) on suspects of a certain color (suspects are R/G/B, with some almost invisible symbols that I could barely find). This means that even though they do very basic things, there are some complex interactions. The Witch, in particular, can get two actions if she has enough favors on someone, so playing on a card that lets you add suspicion to itself and hitting it every turn is powerful.
• One of the actions each side has is to evict a worker (not yourself), so that you can place on it and block it (and you can’t evict yourself). It’s expensive, but if you evict and then grab a worker you can really bleed valuable tempo.
• There is a strategy guide (and comments) saying the Witch is favored (for what it’s worth). That of course is not using the intro scenario, so who knows?
• So far our Hunters have not killed anyone (which requires getting at least some clues on everyone, and a goodly number on the target, and costs them all) but I was sorely tempted to off a probably-innocent suspect because the Witch was getting such good value from him.

So there is a decent amount of strategy space to explore

Rating — Cautiously suggest, but should revisit this soon.

Update — Played a non-scenario regular game (50 card decks, higher cost for ritual, exoneration) and

• Felt much less imbalanced for the Hunter, and probably pro-Witch.
• Took 2 hours, which is long. I don’t know if that was just cautiousness on the Witch player’s part (winning, so just slowly increase influence without giving away who you are instead of risking it all on one throw).
• This game wants to be Netrunner, so … maybe I should just play Netrunner? (I actually picked up a batch of sealed Netrunner extras when the TaoLing was younger “to play with him” and never broke them open.

1. I watched a lot of rules/playthroughs during Covid and now have little taste for them, but I usually skim the intro/outros or have them on in the background while I play Video Games ︎