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2020 in preview: Wicca is a game with an awful lot of ideas

From the co-creator of Sang-Froid.

Now that 2020 is here we're having a little look ahead at some of the year's new games that have us intrigued.

God, I'm excited about Wicca. Not only is it a follow-up to Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves, one of the most interesting strategy/tactical hybrids I've ever played, but it also feels stuffed with the same level of ideas that Sang-Froid came with.

Sang-Froid always felt like a game that had benefited from a certain degree of isolation. Let other games chase the easy pitch; instead, here's a 19th century story of brothers protecting a homestead from wolves and other beasties, a game about managing diminishing resources by placing traps and gadding around a map in real-time as you give your foes a wintry shoeing.

Wicca retains the idea of managing a rangy map, and it drops in a world of magic and spells. You play as a character with a single health point but a bunch of otherworldly tricks to rely on. You can clone yourself to lay down overwhelming firepower, rope in trees and rocks to fence the oncoming hordes in and channel them into areas where they can be whittled down easily, and even connect distant points of the landscape with your own network of teleportation chambers.

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I've been watching the gameplay trailer over and over again since Wicca was announced and it still fills me with wonder and that wonderful kind of anxiousness that only a good strategy game can conjure. If you're interested in tower defence, or simply in games that chuck everything imaginable into the mix, Wicca is something to get very excited about.


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