3 Witches from Allplay

A three-player card game that dares to say “only three” and actually earns it. We sat down with Three Witches from Allplay and found a lean, tense trick taker that turns familiar rules into a focused 2v1 puzzle. One player steps into the role of lead witch, laying two cards each trick—one face up to set pressure, one face down to hold power—while the two lesser witches coordinate to beat the total with carefully timed responses. The twist? Matching rank or suit lets you add values for a bigger punch, elixirs double their partner, and a revealed two plunges the table into hidden-information chaos.

We break down why the bidding stakes matter—calling three or four across just five tricks—and how fate tokens reward precision over greed. There’s real rhythm here: quick hands, fast reshuffles, fresh bids, and a sly recursion rule where the winner’s side chooses which of the lead’s two cards returns to hand. That small loop fuels tempo, mind games, and a lot of second-guessing in a tight 20-minute arc. If you’ve dabbled in trick takers like Skull King or crave the tempo planning of small-box hits, this one brings a new edge without burying you in exceptions.

Along the way, we talk teaching curves, why player aids matter, and how to onboard family who love traditional trick-taking but want something sharper. We also widen the lens to ask why strict player counts can make games better, trimming bloat and amplifying the exact moments that spark table talk and laughter. If you’re hunting for a travel-friendly title that shines with exactly three, Three Witches is a clever, low-cost bet that rewards planning, reading the table, and a touch of mischief.

If you enjoyed this deep dive, subscribe, leave a quick review, and share the episode with your favorite coven of three—then tell us your best three-player-only recommendation.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Cauldron: Episode Setup
• 0:22 Why A Three-Player-Only Design
• 1:45 Roles, Bidding, And Trick Goals
• 3:40 Dual-Card Play And Scoring Sums
• 5:30 Hidden Info: Twos And Elixirs
• 6:39 Flow, Fate Tokens, And Round Reset
• 8:10 Teaching Curve And Playtime
• 10:25 Gateway Trick Takers And Onboarding
• 12:12 Rare Strict Player Counts
• 13:55 Final Thoughts And Listener Prompt

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:16

Bubble bubble toil and treble. Welcome back to the Operation Game Might Podcast. No, it's not Halloween. Yes, we are talking about three witches by All Play. Joining me, as always, my co-host and witch in charge of cauldron brewing, Clayton Gable.

SPEAKER_01: 0:33

What's up, Travis? Thanks for keeping it light with the intros, as always. I'm pretty stoked to talk about this interesting little trick taker from All Play called Three Witches. All right. I think this came out this year, 2025. Yeah. So this is relatively new. Um, if you've been around this podcast, you know I'm a bit of an all-play fanboy. And the tiny box games are just so daggone easy to pick up. These things are, you know, fit in your back pocket and cost ten dollars. So I'm pretty much willing to give any of them a try. And this one really caught my eye because it's best at three players and it only plays at three players. And I'm like, man, I I hats off, I respect when a game says, This is what I'm doing. You're gonna do it on my terms, and it's gonna be awesome. You know, I'm not gonna try and please the five-player crowd. I don't care if you're a solo gamer. We're playing this at three. That's how you play it. And so three witches is a three-player game. It's a three-player trick taker game, which is sweet because I have a lot of situations where my mom loves trick-taking games. She comes to visit me and Mary. And so it's three of us. And we usually end up playing whatever trick taker here or there. Um, but I was like, this is a perfect game for that situation when mom's in town and we can play a game designed exactly for this player count. So I was ambitious. I I had this sitting there, I didn't really know anything about it, but my mom was here this weekend, so I was like, Mom, before you leave, I I really wanted to play this trick taking game. Uh, I got it, it's for three players only. So she's like, sure. And then I started reading the rules, and I was like, Well, this is weird because it there's it was a little obtuse reading through because in Three Witches it's a 2v1 trick taker, and so every round one player becomes the lead witch, and then the other two players are lesser witches trying to stop the lead witch from getting their tricks. So, yeah, and the way it works is you know, uh the lead witch is determined through uh bidding at the start of your hand, so pretty common to trick-taking games, you know, bidding how many tricks you're gonna take. So you get six cards each, and to bid, you have to bid either three or four. Uh if you bid three, somebody can uh overtake you and bid four. So uh you know, whoever if if someone bids three, nobody else wants to pass that, then the person who bid three is the lead witch. Otherwise, another person has a chance to bid four, and then they're the lead witch. So if you bid four tricks, or you play five tricks in a in a hand. So if you bid four tricks, you're saying I'm gonna take four of the five tricks as the lead witch. And the way it plays out, it's calling it trick taking is interesting because uh it has uh some uh semblance of trick taking, but there's a lot of weird stuff going on here. So each team, if you think of the lead witch as a team and the two lesser witches as a team, gets to play two cards uh each turn. So the lead witch will play one card face up and one card face down. The face up card is the the lead suit. So then the first lesser witch has to follow suit or they can pass. Then the next lesser witch has to follow suit and it you can pass or play an off suit card. Okay, and then the second lesser witch has the same option, but eventually the two lesser witches have to play two cards, and the way it resolves is the interesting part that I was like when I was reading the rules, I was like, this is weird, but after playing it, I was like, Oh, that's pretty cool. So if your team, if the lead witch plays two cards that are the same rank, so two threes, you get to add those two numbers together, and that's the value of your turn, right? So I would get six. Okay. If you play two cards of the same suit, you also get to add the values of your cards. So if I played the two of bats and the five of bats, I would get seven. Okay. If you play cards that don't match suit or rank, you just have to take the value of the higher cards you played. Oh so as the lead witch, I know exactly what I'm playing and what I'm gonna be scoring, and one's face up, one's face down, and then the two lesser witches have to try and beat me by playing cards from their hand to like map matching the revealed suit, yeah. Matching the revealed suit they can, but it doesn't matter if they can't, like it's not like a normal trick taker in that way. Like, after like once the lead suit's declared by the lead witch, if the two other people played off suit and they matched numbers and the sum of that was higher than the lead witch, it doesn't matter. But it just is like uh if you do have if you do have the suit that the lead witch led with, you have to follow. So it can kind of force them into something they might not want to do. A couple other interesting twists are that if the two is played face up for the lead witch, that means that the two lesser witches have to play their cards face down, so they can't see what the other one's playing. Okay, and then there's an elixir card that if whatever it's paired with, it doubles the value of it.

SPEAKER_00: 6:35

Okay, interesting.

SPEAKER_01: 6:37

Yeah, it's super interesting. And the as we just kept playing through hands in hands, I was like, oh my gosh, I love this game. This is so cool because as a lead witch, you just feel like you're you're in control, you know what's going on, but it's still hard, like because you have to manage everything just right and make sure that you know you're playing the right, and then it becomes hard too because if you get more than you're supposed to, you also don't win that hand. So if you're the lead witch and you get your bid exactly, you get two fate tokens.

unknown: 7:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 7:12

If the lead witch doesn't get their bid exactly, the two lesser witches each get one. So then so then you shuffle by the cards back up, deal them back out, everybody bids again. Somebody knews the lead witch, and then well, it could be the same person, um, or it could be somebody news the lead witch, and now you have a do a new 2v1 scenario where two people are trying to you know collaborate to play these cards out in the right way to um beat the lead witch, and it's super neat.

SPEAKER_00: 7:42

And the the lead witch just gets passed to next player once that you know round of tricks is complete.

SPEAKER_01: 7:49

No, you shuffle the cards again, okay, and then everybody looks at their hand and you bid again. So and then whoever did the highest bid, they're the lead witch.

SPEAKER_00: 8:02

Are you sacrificing cards to bid like you do in no loose ends or anything?

SPEAKER_01: 8:07

No, and the other cool thing, yeah. The other cool thing about being the lead witch is I play my two cards, and then at the end of the that turn, I get whether I won or lost the trick, I get to take one of those cards back into my hand. Oh, so if I won the trick, I get to decide which card goes back into my hand. If I lost the trick, the two lesser witches decide which card goes back into my hand.

SPEAKER_00: 8:35

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01: 8:36

That's cool. It is an awesome game that I can only play with three players.

SPEAKER_00: 8:42

Yeah, so you said you played with what, Mary, Mary and your mom? How'd they like it?

SPEAKER_01: 8:47

They liked it. As I was describing it, they both of them were like giving me looks like what are you talking about? Like you played two cards, one faced up, one face down. What do you mean the value is like some weird sum of different cards? But after after a couple turns, it it makes pretty good sense, and we were humming.

SPEAKER_00: 9:08

I mean, what last week, two weeks ago, you were talking about was it jungo that's the uh quicker version of Scout?

SPEAKER_01: 9:17

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 9:18

Like that one has a couple of I mean, Scout has nuances that jungle does not. This one, you're kind of jumping back up a little bit in a little bit in complexity, up to a two from like, I don't know, a one point zero it with jungle or whatever it was. Yeah, like was that received well? Like the I obviously Mary and your mom play uh trick takers enough to understand keep up and understand what's going on. But like, was it did you guys get hung up on any rules or anything like that?

SPEAKER_01: 9:50

No, not really. Uh a couple times we forgot when the lead witch played a face up to that you we had to play our cards face down, but that's just like a you know, a simple oversight. It wasn't a complicated rule in and of itself. Um, I think I wouldn't introduce this to two people who never played, you know, even though it's the trick taking is there for sure, but it's not like your standard, you know, lead must follow Trump type deal. Yeah, it has pieces of that, but it's not that intuitive, just if you know that. So I don't know. I wouldn't I wouldn't be the first one I introduce to somebody, but I definitely think like as long as you understand it, and and once I wrap my head around it, it flows pretty smooth. I mean, you're basically just adding up the lead witches cards and then adding up the two lesser witches' cards, and whoever had the higher number wins. And you yeah, just and this comes with nice player aids for each of each of the people that explains like okay, if you have the same rank, you get to add your cards. If you have the same suit, you get to add your cards. If you have neither, you just pick the higher card. Yeah, so yeah, the actual and the actual like tricks and turns are really fast. I mean, you're playing the lead witch puts down two cards, two lesser witches play one card each, and then that's the trick. And you do that, you know, you play five tricks per round, I guess. So it it moves along pretty quick.

SPEAKER_00: 11:32

I was gonna that was gonna be my next question. It says 20 minute playtime on board game geek. Is that accurate? Longer, shorter? Yeah, that's accurate, I would say. Exactly 20 minutes, not a second later.

SPEAKER_01: 11:44

I mean, it with me teaching it and learning it for the first time, we were probably at like 25 30. Yeah, but so it it would definitely be quicker the next time.

SPEAKER_00: 11:55

What is the first trick taker that you would introduce to somebody if you were just setting them down, never played a trick taker before?

SPEAKER_01: 12:03

Good question. I would probably go with this is a cop the skull king. Okay, and let me tell you why. Because you ramp up the cards, right? I mean, you start out so simple, everybody gets one card, you know. You can play that that round, that trick in like 30 seconds, everybody gets into the flow of it. Then the next time you get two cards, and so you're kind of learning and teaching as you go. You can pretty much, I mean, once you can kind of tell them about following suit and you know what trumps what, which is a little complicated in Skull King because of the pirates can beat the mermaids and the Skull King loses to a mermaid, and then you know that type of situation. But I I do like the escalating card handout per round. I think that lends itself well to introducing the new people, but and you have to yell yo ho ho before every round, so yes, I will say I don't always yo ho ho. Wow, I'm blasphemous. I know kick me off the podcast. Um, they should have had something like that for three witches, but can you think of any other games that I mean two-player games, obviously, but yeah, apart from like two-player and one-player games, I don't know many games that are that rigid in a player count. I think Deal with the Devil was one that was like you need four people to play this.

SPEAKER_00: 13:36

Yeah, it was like four to like eight, it was like four, six, or eight. You needed like exactly sets of two, I think. I have it sitting back here.

SPEAKER_01: 13:46

Even that's more lenient. But yeah, I was just trying to think if I if I could think of any besides one and two player games that literally say this is it. Yeah, this is only a three-player game.

SPEAKER_00: 13:57

This is only a five-player game. And now that I'm like thinking about it, there's not that many three-player games, period. I mean, like you can adjust like two-player, three-player, you know, two to five or whatever it is, but like strictly three players, maybe some like dexterity games or something. I I can't think of any.

SPEAKER_01: 14:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 14:17

But if you, dear listener, know of any three-player games, we want them. We want to hear your favorite three-player games. I want to hear three player only, three-player only games.

SPEAKER_01: 14:28

Yeah, if it plays more or less than three, don't tell me about it. I don't want to know.

SPEAKER_00: 14:34

That's right. Awesome. Anything else on three witches?

SPEAKER_01: 14:37

That's all I got. I think is really clever. If you like trick taken and you have a spare ten dollars to toss to all play, I would check it out and play it with two of your favorite little witches.

SPEAKER_00: 14:49

That's right. And maybe you can like wave your hands over the cards before you play them and yell like bubble bubble toil in trouble. Absolutely. You all put your hands on and you go, witches, and then you play your trick. Sounds uh, I'm gonna do that next time. All right. All right, this has been three witches. I have been Travis. He has been the head witch, Clayton Gable. This has been Operation Game Night, and we're out.