What’s up Witches?! After a lovely break, we’re back with a new year, new first impressions. Let me introduce you to the cutest new pick-up and deliver game on the block: Delivery Witches from Undigital Atelier.

Delivery Witches is a tabletop adventure adapted from the digital world of Mika and the Witch’s Mountain. As apprentice witches, players flit around the map picking up and delivering packages on behalf of the quirky residents, gaining magical experience and money as they go. Do you have the broom skills to ascend the mountain and become the best delivery witch?

Gameplay overview:

👥 1 to 4 players
⌛  60 – 150 minutes
🧠 10 years+

You start your little Witchy postal service in an adorable coastal village. The board is divided into three areas: the village, mysterious woods and the intimidating mountain. You can only progress to each new area once you’ve given your broom a shiny new upgrade.

On your turn, you get 4 actions, which you can spend to:

• Move to any free space connected by a path. They include pick-up spaces, upgrade spaces or cute little houses.
• Pick-up a delivery (as long as you’re on a delivery space).
• Pay to upgrade abilities or broom (as long as you’re on an upgrade space).

You can also choose to save actions to use your next turn (up to a max of 8 actions). Dropping off a package is free, you just have to get to the right house! Each package has a corresponding house on the map with a matching colour and symbol. 

Some deliveries include ‘mastery restrictions’, which are either time hazards (deliver in X number of actions) or avoiding mountain/waterfall hazards on your delivery route. Meeting the mastery restriction isn’t compulsory, but it does mean you’ve got mad delivery skillz and you get to move up mastery tracks. The player with the highest level for each mastery skill gets a cheeky little point bonus at the end of game.

During the game you can also claim abilities that give you useful extra powers, such as being able to pick up two deliveries at a time, get bonus coins for deliveries, or the ability to ignore environmental hazards. If you’re savvy enough, you can get abilities that can be used in combo to really give you that edge.

As you progress through the game, you can unlock medals (essentially the game’s objective tiles) and add them to your player board. Medals can be for a range of things, like dropping off 4 deliveries of the same colour or unlocking 3 abilities. They’re worth points at the end of the game – but how many points depends on who wins them first (the first person to get a medal gets the most points, the next person gets less points, and so on).

The final round of the game triggers when a player has filled all 4 of their medal spaces on the board. The player with the most points from deliveries, medals and mastery tiles is the winner and best delivery witch across the lands.

Our first impressions:

I love cozy games, and Delivery Witches definitely…delivers! It’s very accessible with straightforward rules, which makes it perfect for families, cozy-lovers, or new board gamers to pick up and play. The theme and artwork are really cute and add to the cozyness – I loved the variety of different character designs – especially seeing the same characters pop up with different (and very amusing!) expressions. But it may feel too light a game for experienced or heavy-weight gamers (unless they’re looking for a new gateway game to play with newbies).

Cute and breezy, and with some opportunity for light strategy – cozy gamers and families, this one’s for you!

Each area of the map is self-contained, with its own delivery card deck, so it felt like playing three ‘levels’ and kept the game light. In our 2-player game we had limited interaction or space blocking as we moved around the map, but we imagine this would increase with a higher player count and possibly add difficulty. There are also advanced medals (we only played with the medals recommended for a first game), which could also add more of a challenge as well as a little variety.

The ability cards are selected from a choice of three cards in a central market. In the current rules there isn’t a way to refresh them (new cards only come out to replace cards that get bought by players). This became an issue in our game because Matt didn’t want any of the abilities that were available and there was no way to get new ones (I’d already got all my abilities *smug*). You could argue that part of the challenge is developing a strategy with what is available, but we think a rule to allow you to refresh the ability cards would be nice, especially as there are duplicate abilities that can clog the market.

A final minor issue, but we found it difficult to keep track of timed mastery restrictions, where you needed to deliver a package in X number of actions. There was no formal way to monitor this, and it was easy to lose track. In the end we came up with our own system and used crystals on the package card to keep track.

Final thoughts:

Cute and breezy, and with some opportunity for light strategy – cozy gamers and families, this one’s for you! And if you’re a fan of the original digital game, Delivery Witches makes for a great introduction to modern boardgaming.

Do you fancy taking to the skies on a broomstick to live out your witchy Yodel dreams? Delivery Witches is still open for late pledges, so grab it while you can!

---

This prototype was kindly loaned by Undigital Atelier via the UK Board Game Review Circle. All opinions are ours and our reviews are always honest.