The Witches

#PratchatNAX Notes and Errata

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These are the notes and errata for our bonus live episode “The Snail Trick”, discussing Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent’s 2023 Discworld book, Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch – in front of a live audience at the Australian Discworld Convention in Sydney!

Iconographic Evidence

Liz, Ben and the Megapode (ho! The Megapode!) at the Gala Dinner during Nullus Anxietas X.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title blends Ben’s favourite new detail from the book, Petulia’s “snail hotel” purse, with the most infamous – her “pig trick”. But you knew that.
  • We’ve previously appeared at several other Nullus Anxietas events, and released the results as episodes in one way or another:
    • “A Troll New World” about “Troll Bridge”, was our first live episode, recorded at Nullus Anxietas 7 in Melbourne in 2019, with guest Tansy Rayner-Roberts.
    • “Twice as Alive” was a special live online episode recorded for Nullus Anxietas: The Lost Con, the online convention held in 2021. It revisited Men at Arms for the first time since #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory”, in 2017.
    • “A Tale of Two Carpets” was a pre-recorded discussion comparing The Carpet People (1971) and The Carpet People (1992). It was broadcast as part of the Virtual Discworld Fun Day in 2022, as a replacement for the sadly cancelled Nullus Anxietas 7a. The original Nullus Anxietas version is available on YouTube, and there’s also an annotated version (i.e. Ben added text-caption footnotes and a few other extras) available only to podcast subscribers.
    • “Unalive from Überwald” about “Death and What Comes Next” was our second live in-person episode, recorded at Nullus Anxietas 9 in Adelaide in 2024, with guests Tansy Rayner-Roberts and Karen J Carlisle.
  • Our interview with Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent about Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch was released as Pratchat74, “Hogswitch”, in December 2023.
  • Paul Hogan (1939-) is an Australian actor and comedian who leveraged appearances on a television talent show into his own sketch comedy series, before finding international fame as Mick “Crocodile” Dundee, the titular character in the 1986 Australian film Crocodile Dundee. It’s essentially a romantic comedy in which Sue, a journalist from New York, travels to the Northern Territory to meet Mick, a “legendary” white bushman who fights off snakes and crocodiles with ease. It hasn’t aged well in many respects, but several of its scenes and lines became iconic, including one in which Mick scares off a would-be armed mugger by drawing his much bigger knife. The film was a major hit at the time, and established the modern American “outback fantasy” idea of what Australia (and Australians) are like. Hogan went on to become a tourism icon for Australia, famously inviting Americans by promising to “throw another shrimp on the barbie”. The film had two sequels, neither of which is highly regarded, though 1988’s Crocodile Dundee II – in which Sue’s ex-husband sends evidence against a drug cartel to Sue before being murdered, putting her and Mick in danger – was also a box office hit.
  • James Eoin Stephen Paul McKeown, better known as Jimeoin, is an Irish comedian who rose to prominence in the 1990s in Australia. His self-titled television show, Jimeoin, ran from 1994 to 1995, and featured the snail joke Ben re-tells in this episode.
  • The Fifth Element is a 1997 sci-fi action film directed by Luc Besson, starring Bruce Willis, Mila Jovovich and Gary Oldman. Set a few centuries in the future when the Earth is threatened by the return of a “great evil”, the weapon that can defeat it made up of the four classical elements, and a mysterious “fifth element”, represented by a young woman who is destroyed and then re-built using futuristic technology. The film is visually incredible, but is perhaps the poster child for the problematic narrative trope dubbed “born sexy yesterday” – a “blank slate” young woman who is magically or technologically created as a physical adult, but with limited maturity and life experience.
  • The Fifth Elephant is the 24th Discworld novel, published in 1999 when The Fifth Elephant was still fresh in everyone’s memories. Aside from the title, it doesn’t really have any connection to the film. We discussed in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King”, in 2021.
  • The 1990s hit TV series Charmed originally starred Shannen Doherty, Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano as “the charmed ones”, a trio of sisters who discover they are witches, each with a magical superpower, who can combine their magic to cast spells and vanquish demons. It ran for eight seasons between 1998 and 2006, though Shannon Doherty left after the third season and was replaced by Rose McGowan as a secret half-sister of the other three. They don’t seem to ever seriously claim that zippers were invented by witches, but in an early episode from the first season, “The Witch is Back”, a witch summoned through time from 300 years earlier is so impressed with the zipper on a dress she is loaned that she declares “a wise witch made this!” A reboot of the series with a new trio of charmed ones ran for four seasons from 2018 to 2022, though it had no involvement from the original cast and crew, and wasn’t as successful as the original.
  • We covered The Witches board game in #Pratchat67, “The Three-Elf Problem”. In the game, players take on the role of Tiffany or one of three other trainee witches, visiting various locations in the Lancre area to solve “problems” like sick pigs, pregnancies and deaths. Successfully solving a problem involves rolling dice, but there are various ways to improve the result, including using magic – though this and other missteps earn you “cackle counters”, which track your progress to becoming like Black Aliss. You can only remove cackle counters by sacrificing a turn to move to a location with another witch, “taking tea” and talking about your problems to keep you both grounded.
  • We discussed Raising Steam in #Pratchat90, “Mind the Ginnungagap”.
  • The pig trick first appears in A Hat Full of Sky, where the audience at the Witch Trials are amazed that Petulia intends to do it “without a pig” and “using only a sausage”. This may indicate that “the pig trick” is something infamous from witch lore, and the sausage version is Petulia’s unique spin on it. Since Tiffany and Granny are staring at each other at the time, the narration from Tiffany’s point of view only notes “a squeal”, followed by a “gasp of amazement” and applause from the crowd.
  • Willow is a 1988 fantasy film directed by Ron Howard and produced by George Lucas, starring Warwick Davis as the titular character, a wannabe wizard from a village of humble farmers. Early in the film, Willow botches his “disappearing pig trick”, which as Ben mentions is stage magic rather than actual sorcery. The movie stands up pretty well, and also stars Val Kilmer as the swordsman who helps Willow protect a baby who is prophesied to be the doom of an evil sorceress, played by Jean Marsh.
  • “The pissing boy in Brussells” is the famous statue Manneken Pis, a bronze of a small naked boy which is part of a fountain located not far from the main square in Brussells, the capital of Belgium. Some version of the fountain dates back to the 15th century, though the version known now was sculpted by Jérôme Duquesnoy the Elder in around 1619, and upgraded in the early 18th century. The one on public display is a replica, as the original was frequently stolen, and is now in a museum. He’s a popular tourist attraction and is often dressed in various clothes made for him – there’s even a museum of his outfits (which number in the hundreds) down the street.
  • Gnomes is the English title of the 1976 book, Leven en werken van de kabouter (‘Life and work of the gnomes’) by Dutch writer Wil Huygen, and based on the illustrations by Dutch artist Rien Poortvliet. The book pretends to be a biological and historical study of a species of tiny humanoids known as gnomes, based on European folklore, and credited to a gnome named David. It was a huge hit, including in the United States and Spain. It was adapted for television, first in 1980 as a one-hour telemovie in the US, and later as several series for Spanish television, starting with David, el gnomo in 1985 (dubbed into English as The World of David the Gnome).
  • Mage: The Ascension was first published by White Wolf in 1993, with later editions in 1995 and 1999, plus a Twentieth Anniversary Edition (M20) published in 2015. That last edition contains a brief bit about magic vs magick on page 41, under the heading ‘That “M” Word with that Funny “K”’. The fictional author addressing the player’s character, a new mage, says:

Many people find the word pretentious… but then, a certain degree of pretention is inevitable when you play games with reality. As far as I’m concerned, it’s pretense only if you can’t live up to the power of your claims. And since living up to such power is what magick is all about, that spelling seems appropriate to me.

  • The snail purse does appear to be new to Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch; it’s not mentioned in any of the novels in which Petulia appears, and snails are generally only mentioned in the context of being farmed and eaten by Feegles.
  • For the record, the gear Ben used to record this episode was a PreSonus AudioBox 44VSL digital interface, three Shure SM58 microphones, and a 2019 13” MacBook Pro running Reaper (the software Ben still uses for all his audio editing). When we meet in person for board game episodes, he currently uses a set of RØDE Procaster microphones instead, and is hoping to upgrade to a newer digital interface or mobile digital mixer/recorder in the near future. (The AudioBox works, but is getting a bit old.)
  • You can read the Modiphius media release about their upcoming board games on their website. As of the publication of this episode, no updates have been given about either Readers Digested or Kill Sam Vimes, though we’ll note that the former is also the title of
  • We were pressed to mention a few of our favourite guests, and while we hasten to say “splendid chap, all of them”, the specific mentions go to:

#Pratchat67 – The Three-Elf Problem

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This month we welcome back the very game Steve Lamattina as we put on our witch’s hats, grab our brooms and head out into Lancre to solve problems in Martin Wallace’s The Witches, the fourth official Discworld board game.

As Tiffany Aching or one of her fellow apprentice witches, you’ll run around Lancre solving problems big and small with headology and magic, helped by an assortment of local characters. But it’s not just about getting the highest score – you’ll also need to watch each other’s backs or everyone in the kingdom could lose! Be sure to stop and share tea, or you might end up a cackler…

Which witch is your favourite? How does The Witches rank against the other Discworld board games? Do you see it as a great family game, a mediocre co-op challenge, or something in between? Who do you wish had been included as a card or playable character? And would you use the game to introduce your friends to board games, the Discworld, or both?

Check out the episode notes for pictures of the game components, and use the hashtag #Pratchat67 on social media to join in the conversation on this one!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:27:39 — 40.6MB)

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Steve Lamattina is a writer and editor whose work spans film, music, education and technology. He was once CEO of the youth publishing company Express Media, whom we still stan, and currently works for the Victorian Department of Education. You can find him on Twitter as @steve_lamattina.

Next month we’re going back…back to nearly the beginning! Yes, for #Pratchat68 we’re setting the procrastinator coordinates for 1981 as we read and discuss Pratchett’s proto-Discworld sci-fi novel Strata. It’s a nice short book to get in before we tackle The Long Utopia in July… Use the hashtag #Pratchat68 to send us questions about Strata!

You’ll find the full notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

#Pratchat67 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 67, “The Three-Elf Problem“, discussing Martin Wallace’s 2013 Discworld board game, The Witches, with returning guest Steve Lamattina.

Iconographic Evidence

As promised, here are some photos of the game.

A photo of the board, components, rules and box of The Witches board game.
The board, components and the box.
An annotated photo of the box for The Witches board game, showing the names of each of the characters on it.
Which witch is which? Get your answers here!
A photo of the board, cards and other components of The Witches board game.
A pile of components. The pink tokens featuring townsfolk are Crisis tokens; the yellow ones featuring a witch with crazy eyes are Cackle tokens; and the larger square ones are Black Aliss tokens. The green square tiles are Easy Problems, and the purple ones are Hard Problems.
A photo of The Witches board game during play.
Ben’s hand during his first, four-player game of The Witches.
A photo of four cards depicting more obscure characters.
A photo of the cards from The Witches board game we mentioned as our favourites in the episode.
Some of our favourite cards, as discussed in the questions section near the end.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title takes inspiration from the 2008 science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem by Chinese author Liu Cixin. The novel in turn takes it’s title from the three-body problem of physics, which refers to the difficulty of calculating the relative motion of three bodies whose masses will interact thanks to gravitational force. In the game, three elves are a problem because they cause everyone to immediately lose.
  • Steve last appeared on Pratchat for Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You”, discussing Only You Can Save Mankind, back in February 2020 – the second-last time we recorded regularly in person.
  • The last in-person episode was #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”, with Fury. We moved to remote recording from episode 30 (“Looking Widdershins”), though Ben did record in person for “The Troll’s Gambit” with Melissa Rogerson, in November 2022.
  • Dimity Hubbub is not actually known for being talkative, but rather being clumsy; in her first appearance she has set fire to her own hat, and steps on a piece of Annagramma’s occult jewellery. Dimity appears in A Hat Full of Sky (where she appears in two scenes), Wintersmith (in which she gets a whole two lines of dialogue) and The Shepherd’s Crown (again, only very briefly).
  • Tiffany’s time in Lancre is covered in A Hat Full of Sky (#Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home”) and Wintersmith (#Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer“).
  • Lancre Gorge features fairly prominently in Wyrd Sisters, and is where Lord Felmet eventually ends up. In Lords and Ladies, its described like this: “Lancre is cut off from the rest of the lands of mankind by a bridge over Lancre Gorge, above the shallow but poisonously fast and treacherous Lancre River.” (A footnote admits that “Lancrastians did not consider geography to be a very original science.”)
  • Garth Nix, who was our guest for #Pratchat51 a bit over a year ago, is an Australian science fiction and fantasy author best known for his Old Kingdom series of young adult fantasy novels. In the books, the “Old Kingdom” is a place of sorcery and monsters, separated from its neighbour Ancelstierre by a wall which keeps the magic out. The first book is 1995’s Sabriel, while the latest is the prequel Terciel and Elinor, published in late 2021.
  • The various editions of The Witches (which is called The Witches: A Discworld Game on BoardGameGeek) include:
    • The Treefrog Games’ Collector’s Edition, published in an edition of 2,000 copies, featuring the pewter miniatures and a cloth bag to keep them in, an A1 poster of artwork from the game, different artwork on the box cover, a different shaped box, and a larger map. (We presume this just means physically larger, not that there are any additional locations.) While you can’t buyt the minatures separately, you did used to be able to buy a set of coloured plastic miniatures for the game from Micro Art Studio in Poland, who still produce a line of Discworld miniatures – though the young witches are no longer available.
    • The Mayfair Games Standard Edition, the one we played. It has wooden witch’s hat pieces for the players.
    • The game has also been published in several other languages: German, Polish, Russian, Bulgarian, Czech and Spanish. These all appear to use the same art, with only the text translated.
  • Mayfair Games was
  • Martin Wallace is an English game designer who now lives in Australia. After getting his start in wargames in the 1990s, he became a very well-known game designer. His games include the heavy train games Brass: Lancashire (originally just Brass) and it’s successor Brass: Birmingham; two quite different editions of A Study in Emerald, a Sherlock Holmes/H.P. Lovecraft mash-up based on the short story by Neil Gaiman; and most recently the fantasy war game Bloodstones. (Ben is mistaken, however, about Once Upon a Time and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which were designed by the entirely different (if similarly named) James Wallis. Sorry James!) Martin’s company Treefrog Games was active until 2016, when he closed it down to focus on working as a designer. Bloodstones was his first new venture in self-publishing since then, this time under the name “Wallace Designs”.
  • The very brief Martin Wallace interview about The Witches can be found in the BoardGameGeek forums for The Witches. Read the interview here.
  • When Nanny visits the Long Man in Lords and Ladies, she takes Casanunda along with her. His mind is boggled both by the Long Man, and the resemblance of the King of the Elves within to “his picture”.
  • The Felmets appear in Wyrd Sisters (#Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches”), and they do indeed both die by the end of the book. Lord Felmet plunges to his death in Lancre Gorge, while Lady Felmet is cast into the woods, where the woodland creatures, acting as the soul of the country itself, er…take care of her.
  • Ben hasn’t been able to think of any other games that split a dice roll in half, though there are many that use a “push-your-luck” mechanic. This is usually achieved by allowing a player to re-roll one or more of their dice with an escalating level of risk and reward.
  • Melbourne’s public transport network, created by the “Octopus Act” in the late eighteenth century, has a large number of train and tram lines radiating out from the Central Business District. While there used to be two “circle lines” that connected stations on these lines to each other, nowadays to change from one to the other you generally have to travel into the city and back out again. Only buses travel in alternate directions, but they are generally less frequent and less reliable, thanks to traffic.
  • Agnes Nitt and Perdita X Dream appear briefly in Lords and Ladies, but are best known from Maskerade (#Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“) and Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires”).
  • Ben’s favourite board game Pandemic was designed by Matt Leacock and first published in 2008. It’s a fully co-operative game (see below) in which players are members of the Centre for Disease Control, trying to keep four global pandemics in check while they find cures for them all. The current edition of the game is published by Z-Man Games.
  • Fully cooperative games are ones in which players do not compete, but instead win or lose (and sometimes score) together. Board game examples include Pandemic, Flash Point: Fire Rescue and Spirit Island. Semi-cooperative games feature some cooperation, but the players also compete against each other in some way. In Ben’s experience, most such games feature strong player cooperation, usual through a high chance of everyone losing, but add in secret personal goals that might put them into conflict. This is a feature of “hidden traitor” and social deduction games like Battlestar Galactica and Dead of Winter, though these might also be considered team games. The Witches is different in that the competitive side of the game dominates; the cooperative element is relatively light, with the threat of losing fairly slight.
  • Solo board games are very popular in the “print and play” scene – cheap games you can download and print on paper yourself. They include Bargain Basement Bathysphere (since published as a boxed game), Utopia Engine and RATS: High Tea at Sea. Nemo’s War is at the other end of the scale: it’s a large game with a big board, hundreds of components and several expansions. Other boxed solo games include Under Falling Skies (which started life as a print and play game), Final Girl, Coffee Roaster and Deep Space D-6.
  • We discussed Good Omens back in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Nice and Accurate)”.
  • The Discworld Emporium is the most famous officially licensed producer of Discworld merchandise which grew out of Clarecraft, a fantasy figurine business run by Isobel and Bernard Pearson, who started doing Discworld miniatures in the early 1990s. We most recently talked about them in #Pratchat53, “A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner”. They are credited as the author of many of the more recent spin-off books, like The Compleat Ankh-Morpork and The Nac Mac Feegle Big Wee Alphabet Book, so you’ll no doubt here some more about them before we’re done.
  • The fans whose likenesses were used for the box art witches were Kate Oldroyd (Tiffany Aching), Victoria Lear (Petulia Gristle) and Pam Gower (Granny Weatherwax). As we mentioned, Pam sadly passed away in January 2023. She wasn’t just the inspiration for this box art, but also Paul Kidby’s bust of Granny Weatherwax. You can read Bernard Pearson’s thoughts about Pam in his Cunning Artificer blog in 2015, including an anecdote about her meeting with Terry which also appears in the biography.
  • Rowlf the Dog was one of the original muppet characters, originally performed by Jim Henson. He notably achieved solo fame in the early 1960s as a regular on the Jimmy Dean Show, before becoming the piano player in The Muppet Show and subsequent movies. His big number in The Muppet Movie is a duet with Kermit, “I Hope That Somethin’ Better Comes Along”.
  • Wilfred is the title character of a short film and two television series, all created by Australian comic actors Adam Zwar and Jason Gann, and starring Gann (in a costume) as “Wilfred”, an anthropomorphic dog, who is suspicious and jealous of his owner’s new partner. The original short won awards at Tropfest, Australia’s biggest short film festival, in 2007, and became a series on SBS which ran for two seasons in 2010. It was then adapted for the US market, starring Gann as Wilfred and Elijah Wood as Ryan, a depressed man who befriends Wilfred when his neighbour asks him to look after the dog. In this version the question of whether Wilfred can truly speak, or even really exists, is much more present. The American Wilfred ran for four seasons on FX between 2011 and 2014. There was also a Russian adaptation, retitled Charlie.
  • The board games we recommended are:

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.