Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I play a lot of games. Statistically speaking, in terms of the distribution curve, I play an ungodly number of games. I live well outside the outer edge of three standard deviations from the norm. Between my day job at a board game café and board game reviewing, life is more or less a constant stream of manuals, rules sets, and new iconography.
From time to time I come across a game that feels off somehow. Separate from any question of taste, of whether or not I myself enjoy the game as a matter of personal preference, something isn’t working. Sometimes that means the game is not particularly good, but I always start off by erring on the side of having missed something. I’ll pore over the rulebook from front to back, making sure I haven’t glazed over a critical rule. It happens more often than you’d think. Learning rules on a schedule will do that.
Pagan: Fate of Roanoke feels off to me. It’s achingly slow in the early stretches. It seems to stretch on for an eternity, even with brisk play, in a way that feels impossible. True to form, I have pored over the rulebook multiple times. I have played it with three different players, each of whom also pored over that rulebook. I have read reviews and spent an unreasonable amount of time combing through BGG comments and ratings. I have done everything I can to figure out why Pagan feels off to me when it seems very clearly to be a hit with a lot of people. I can’t figure it out, dear reader. I haven’t a clue.
The idea of Pagan is appealing. A Witch and a Witch Hunter in Roanoke go toe-to-toe. The Hunter has to try and track down the Witch from a selection of nine villagers, while the Witch attempts to complete a ritual before being found out. If the Hunter takes out too many innocents, he loses. The pulpiness of the setting is mirrored in the art. Maren Gutt had a good time with some of this art, and it shows. The back cover of the manual alone is worth whatever Gutt was paid.
In terms of gameplay, Pagan is a marriage of worker placement and card game. Each player has their own deck, and pawns they place on action spaces. The Villagers on the central board serve both as suspects and as action spaces, and each player has a private action board. Meanwhile, the Hunter can play locations and allies to bolster their search, while the Witch can cast spells and brew potions. It’s all very thorough.
In order to win, both players are reliant on getting tokens out onto the board. The Witch has to get a large number of Secrets out, which then have to be converted, three at a time, into Favors. Then, those Favors have to be shuffled around to the right Villager. The Hunter needs Clues and Evidence, which follow similar rules.
The puzzle of shuffling tokens was my favorite part of the game. Each time you visit a Villager, you can distribute resources on their card to other cards. The Villagers are in three different suits, and each individual Villager specifies the suit to which you can distribute its tokens. Because the tokens have to amass on the right card, the places you move each resource can provide clues to the Hunter about what you’re planning to do next. That also means you can mess with the Hunter’s expectations.
The problem, for me, is in the pacing. The process of playing out those tokens and converting them is onerous. Unless I have missed something—I am open to having missed something, I really am, but I don’t think I have—there are only a handful of cards in the Witch’s deck that allow for the distribution of Secrets, and they are easily removed by the Hunter. That would be fine if you were churning through your deck at a rapid clip, but card draw is expensive in this game, to say nothing of the cost of playing the cards.
Even the promising interplay of a two-player worker placement game where the spaces I use on my turn are unavailable to you on yours quickly became tedious. Rather than producing fun exchanges, as happens in games like the excellent Flatiron, we found ourselves mostly using the same spaces over and over again. An hour into one game—the whole of the game is meant to last about an hour—we gave up because we were desperately bored. Nothing was happening. There was no momentum for anyone.
I suppose I mostly find this puzzling because the ratings for Pagan: Fate of Roanoke are astronomically high on BGG. I hesitate to call it a bad game because 450 or so people consider it worth an average of over 8/10. Granted, Pagan was also crowdfunded, and people are notoriously unwilling to admit that they regret backing something. Maybe I’m worried there will be a comment here saying “LOL skill issue.” Who knows?
As for the game, I can’t figure it out. Something feels wrong. Pagan uses some promising ingredients, but I can’t recommend drinking the potion.
Pagan: Fate of Roanoke details
- Designer: Kåre Storgaard, Kasper Kjær Christiansen
- Artists: Maren Gutt
- Publishers: Capstone Games, Games7Days, Lucky Duck Games, Maldito Games, REXhry, Super Meeple, Wyrmgold GmbH
- Release Date: 2022
- Player count : 2
- Age range : 12+
- Time range : 30 - 60 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Action Points, Area Majority / Influence, Deck Construction, Deduction, Hand Management, Turn Order: Claim Action, Worker Placement
- BGG Geek Rating: 8.03205 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about Pagan: Fate of Roanoke.
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