Koven 🔮 | Solo Board Game PaRTy!!! 🎉
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Top Toki here and in today's video we'll be doing a solo playthrough of Coven. During the course of the playthrough, I'll give a tutorial about how the game is played and be sure you stick around for the end of the video where I share my thoughts about the game in general. Before we get started, a huge shout out to designer Steven Smith for sending us a copy to check out here today. But without further ado, let's get started. In coven, we are going to be placing our mythics out onto a 4x4 grid in order to score the best combinations of magical goodness. So, for setup, we're going to start by shuffling the 16 card deck. We'll also place out the Mythic Guild card for scoring or if you're using the Mythic Trials expansion like we will be today, you'll select one of those cards at random and that will be our new scoring objective as well as a specific objective that we are trying to fill in order to win the game. You'll then draw two cards to form your starting hands.
On your turn, you are going to place one of the cards into your 4x4 grid and then draw a new card to replace it. We'll repeat this until we have our complete grid of 16 cards, at which point we'll move into scoring by getting sets of three of the same types of mythics or three of the same color within each row and column. If we are able to fill our objective and get one of the three scoring targets, we will have won the game. Otherwise, we will have lost. And that's all we need to know to get started. So, I'm going to put the box off to the side here, and we're going to get started with our first placement. For our coven trial, we need to have all four witches placed in the middle of the grid. So, we have those three mythics, witches, warlocks, and dragons, and two colors of blue and red. You notice that this card is one of the two special cards where it is neither color, but it counts as both a witch and a warlock. So, we could use this as one of our four middle witches, but I think instead we want to start with this warlock and place it here. Anticipating that it might be on one of the outside edges so that we can get more witches later. We have another warlock, which is red. I think we'll place them down below. And then we have a purple dragon, which counts as a dragon, but it also counts as blue and red for the purposes of scoring. So, maybe we'll think about putting dragons up along the top side.
We have a red witch, which we can place here. So, I'm envisioning that this will be the center of our grid. So, I'm going to move these up just ever so slightly to accommodate that. We have a blue witch, which we can kind of build off of. Here, we have a blue warlock, which if we put here, we'll have three warlocks. And that purple dragon counts as both blue and red. So, that actually gives us double scoring in that row, which I think will be great. And then, let's see what we get next. A blue dragon. So, we could go for all blue here as well, potentially based on what we get. We have a red witch, which gives us the three red. And then we have a blue witch, which gives us the three blue. Okay, this is looking pretty good. I'm holding on to this card for flexibility. If we put this warlock here, we can get three blue and maybe warlocks across the bottom. We have a red witch which we can place here for three red or for three witches and all red. And then I think we're going to be a little bit kind of screwed on our reds since they're all kind of split up here. But we'll see what happens. We have a red warlock which will complete three warlocks and three reds. And then we have a red warlock, which ideally this would be blue, but I don't know that we have any blue cards left. We can also go up here for the three reds since we
already have our three dragons. And looking at our last two cards here, we have a blue witch and this card that can count as either. So if I put this here, it will count as the blue here. And if I put this here, it can count as a witch for this column and a witch for this column. So I think or row and column, respectively. All right. So, woo, pretty quick and easy. We're going to see how we did. So, for our coven card, we have fulfilled the requirement of having four witches meeting in the center four spaces. So, that is really good to see. Now, we just have to get a minimum of 12 and hopefully a maximum of 14 points here. So, we're going to go um by each. So, we have three dragons here and we have three red cards here. So, that's two points. We have three witches and three blue or three blues. So, that is four points total. Three witches and three reds. So, we're at six. And then we have three blues and three warlocks.
So we're at eight. Going up to our columns now. Here we have three witches. Um but not three colors. So we're at nine. Here we have three reds. 10. Here we have three blues. 11. And here we have three blues and three warlocks. 12 13. So we got not the best score of 14, but we did get 13 points here for our coven card. So there you have it. That is a solo playthrough of Coven. I think that this presents a really fun spatial puzzle just as the base game alone and it has really gorgeous presentation if you're into this particular theme. I really like games that utilize multiple different scoring avenues. So having not only the suit of the card with which mythic is on there, but also the color gives a lot of nice consideration to how you build out your grid. And these two special cards really do add some fun tension to the game in terms of when they come up and when you're going to choose to place them. One other thing that I really love about Coven is the two mini expansions that are included with the game. We saw during this playthrough one of the cards for the Mythic Trials expansion, but there are many more which introduce new restrictions to your placement and also give you new objectives for scoring.
With just the base game scoring though, I do also love that you're either shooting for the highest or fewest points. So, either you're trying to get them all together or spread them out as much as possible, which I think is a really interesting way of burying up just the base game mechanics. In addition to that, there is one more mini expansion that we didn't get to see during the playthrough here today, which introduces different monsters that are placed out onto the board. So, this makes it challenging because you need to get 11 or more points to defeat the monster, and it will also take up one of the 16 slots on your final grid. Each monster has different unique abilities that will manipulate the state of the board as well, either during or at the end of the game before scoring. So, the base game is very solid, very fun and puzzly, but the monsters and the spells introduce so much variety where no play is going to be quite the same, especially if you look at using one or the other or combining the two. So, I just think that overall this is a really gorgeous, fantastic package, really smart use of design with the dualpurpose cards and again with a lot of variety from play to play, especially taking into consideration those two mini expansions. So, if you like smallbox card games with a lot of replay-ability, I would definitely check out Coven. And that's about all the time we have for today. If you like the video, found it helpful, a thumbs up really helps games like this get out to a wider audience and it helps out the channel. Thanks so much as always for joining me and we'll see you next time. Bye.