Broom Service Review – Unleash Your Inner Fairy

While it feels heavily inspired by Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, Alexander Pfister’s Broom Service lets you live your dream of being an adolescent drug dealer, peddling potions to anyone with a castle and two hands to catch them.

Despite my hyperbole, Broom Service is a family-friendly game of role selection. Where each round, every player picks four of ten role cards. Then take turns revealing their role cards and carrying out the associated actions.

These actions allow you to move your witch around the map, gather ingredients from a nearby garden, or clear storm clouds to free up new movement options.

However, when you reveal your role, you must choose either a powered-up ‘brave’ version of the action or a weakened ‘cowardly’ version. And your choice MUST be relayed to the other players by either saying:

“I am a brave Forest Witch…”

Or

“I am a cowardly Forest Witch…”  

I’ll give you a second to imagine four gruff, fully bearded, hairy-chested thirty-somethings crowded around a table claiming to be cowardly witches.

Broom Service is as funny as it sounds. But it’s also so much more…

So many choices

Broom Service is a victim of old-school euro design where it’s all about efficiency. While there are 10 roles, none are too exciting. All of the strategic excitement comes from the overall picture rather than the individual components.

And the overall picture is Studio Ghibli quality.

When putting together your roles for the round, you’re not picking them for their strength. But rather you’re putting together a chain of roles, programming where your witch will go and what they will do. You’re then overlaying these thoughts with considerations of how the other players are going to mess up your plans.

A key aspect of Broom Service is when you announce you’re cowardly you instantly take the lessened version of the role. Things get spicier when announcing you’re brave, as you could get an empowered action, but you’re effectively betting that no other players have picked the same role.

If even one other player has the same role as you; you lose your action.

That big brave juicy action you were drooling over. Gone.

This means playing optimally requires you to think four turns, for every player playing. It might be the case you want to be a Mountain Witch for your first turn, but if the old mate sitting across from you is aiming to be a Mountain Witch on their turn three.

Well, there goes all of your plans.

The reverse of this scenario is equally nasty, as being forced to play a card out of sequence is sometimes the same as not playing the card at all.

Embrace the magic (and the chaos)

As we learned in Only Murders in the Building, the best way to make a true-crime podcast is to ‘embrace the chaos’. This is true of enjoying Broom Service as well.

Unfortunately, this is also what annoys me about the game.

With only four cards to choose from each round, you’re limited in what you can choose to play. So instead of thinking about all your opponent’s actions and how to interfere with them. You instead have to spend all your cards on your strategy.

Therefore, all interruptions to your plans feel bad. Because not only does it stuff up your strategy, but it also may stuff up the other person as well.

Comparing Broom Service to another role selection game, Glass Road, makes me appreciate the way Glass Road handles role selection all the more. In Glass Road, you select additional cards each round which will only be used if someone triggers them. It allows you to compartmentalize your thinking into these are cards for me, and these are cards I expect others to play.

Rather than try to defeat the world with only four cards.

More than you can poke a broomstick at

Alexander Pfister is never happy to just design a game. He needs to give you as much content as he possibly can, to the point where if it were possible, he’d also include a free set of steak knives in every box.

In Blackout Hong Kong and Maracaibo he introduced an unneeded but greatly appreciated campaign mode. In Broom Service, there are events each round to keep the game fresh from game to game. And then on top of that, there are also several other modules you can mix and match to increase the complexity of the game. Allowing the game to be played with the family, but then also bringing it out at game night with heavier gamers.

Not too many board games have this kind of versatility or allow you to fulfil your dreams of roleplaying the cowardly lion from The Wizard of Oz.