Baba Yaga - what just happened?

I got the game of Baba Yaga at the local game shop.  I have liked the look of this series of games for a while now; they are designed to look like old tomes full of secrets.  It came with a big story booklet, so you get "a story and a game".  And Baba Yaga is one of my favorite strange characters from Eastern European mythology.

Unpacking it, it looked great, and it was fairly enjoyable figuring out the rules.  But it had some weird physical component that we just found annoying.  Overall, it's a simple game where one player flips tiles and tries to find the 3 or 4 ingredients that match the card in their hand.  Meanwhile, the other player(s) are moving the witch figurine back and forth across the spaces at the middle of the game layout, counting down how much time they have left.

That is all quite enjoyable.  Moving the witch as a sort of timer was a fun, ominous game dynamic.  And there are cards that can add or remove one space from the witch's path, giving the other player slightly more or less time to find the matching tiles.

Where the rules get weird is that there is a card that makes the active player cover their eyes and look through a slit between their fingers.  Which sucks for people who wear glasses.  No, we won't be doing that.  Another card says the active player must put their fist on their table and their chin on their fist to play the next round.  Just to be annoying.  Why?  You get these bonus cards as the result of casting the completed spells from the card in your hand.  And I think 3 of the 6 "spell effects" were total flops for us.

The rules for moving the witch say that each player other than the one actively looking for matches should take turns moving the witch.  We only had two players, but I can imagine that's just a flurry of hands getting in the way.  For two players, the rule literally says to move the witch with one hand, rest that hand on the table and make the next move with the other hand, and keep switching.  Why?  It's not that hard to move at a sensible pace: ONE, tap tap, TWO, tap tap, and so on.  What's with all the silly hand movement?

Using our sensible, less frantic movement rules, the game does have its charm.  Except that the face-up side of each tile has a graphic that gives a hint about what's on the other side, you know, the supposedly hidden items you are supposed to be looking for.  So after a few rounds, you know that the ribbon is under the tile that shows a tree with a ribbon.  So you just flip that tile, no surprise left.  We had pretty much all the tile memorized in no time. There is a card that lets a player put another tile over one spot, to cover up the tile beneath, so that was a step in the right direction.

This was just perplexingly out of whack.  I just wanted to cover up all the tiles, so there is at least the feel of a Concentration game, remembering which tiles are where when they are flipped back over again.  The way it was designed though, I can see each game degenerating into a big slappy hand fight.