. . . Playing Mice & Mystics

The mice and monsters

Since I got my mice painted, I needed to put them to good use. My oldest son (6 years old) has been begging to play with my minis for a while, and he’s  smart, so I figured the 7+ age recommendation on the game was in his range. My wife was also interested in seeing how the game worked, so the family (minus the 3 year old, who only wandered in to roll dice every once in a while) sat down to play. It helps that the game is cooperative, so we don’t have to compete with each other.

Mice & Mystics was designed by Jerry Hawthorne and published by Plaid Hat Games. It comes in a hefty box with a bunch of square board tiles representing the rooms of the castle; cards for events, items, skills, and characters; minis representing the heroic mice and their enemies; some cardboard counters for tracking health, time, and cheese; and some custom dice for resolving actions. The overall style of the design is what I would call “realism cartoon”–the board tiles are mostly dark-toned and project a gritty kind of medieval world, and the characters are drawn heroically–more in the style of Mouse Guard than Mickey.

The story of M&M tells us that all of the mice were once humans who were imprisoned by an evil queen. In order to escape their prison and fight back against the tyrant queen, they used magic to turn themselves into mice–inadvertently turning many of their captors into rats. The “campaign” mode of the game tells the story of the attempts by the mice to rescue their kingdom. There are multiple scenarios to the campaign, with each one telling one small part of the mousey revolution. Each scenario details which board sections to use and what special rules apply to each room. It also has a narrative that fills in the story of the mice–a particularly nice touch, especially given that the writing evokes the heroic feel of the game and the whimsy of playing revolutionary mice.

Oh, no! Our mice fell into the sewers! Can they get out before being swept away by the current?

Game play is pretty simple. Each player controls one or more mice–depending on the chapter and the number of players. Each mouse follows a typical fantasy type–warrior, thief, healer, wizard, ranger. You set up the initial board and deal cards to see in what order the mice (and their enemies) take their actions. On each mouse’s turn, the player gets to move the mouse (roll 1 die and add its number to the Paw/Movement attribute on the mouse’s character card). Before or after that move, the player gets to take one action–search for loot, attack a bad guy, move again, use an ability, etc. When you take an action, you roll a number of dice equal to the mouse’s relevant attribute (his Sword skill to attack, her Shield skill to defend, etc.) The dice have different symbols on them–number, swords, shields, stars, and cheese. Your skills and actions tell you what you want to roll, but this is mostly obvious. I.e when attacking, you want to roll swords; when defending you want to roll shields. When attacking or defending with your mouse, you usually want to roll cheese, too. (Cheese acts as experience points and energy. You can use cheese to power some of the mouse’s skills or save your cheese to buy new skills.)

Since the game is cooperative, the bad guys have rules that define how they act. Usually this means that they move to attack the nearest mouse, or if there are multiple mice at the same distance, they attack the one highest in the initiative order. A big part of the game play is setting up who can deal the most damage to the bad guys and who can soak their attacks in return. When the bad guys attack and defend, any cheese they roll gets added to a clock on the game board. When the clock fills up with cheese, they get some reinforcements, and time advances one “chapter.” Each scenario only has so many chapters, and if you run out of chapters, your mice lose that scenario. Your mice win if they can complete the objectives of the scenario. (In the first scenario, the objective is to escape from the castle, but there’s an optional side quest to get the castle cook on your side.)

There are some other rules, mainly explaining what happens with special bad guys (like the castle’s cat), terrain effects (water, high tables, etc.), or special equipment (like a grape-a-pult you can make if you find a fork and a grape).

So far, we’ve played the opening scenario twice. The first time we tried to help the cook and wound up too weak to get out of the castle before we ran out of time. The second time, we ignored the cook’s pleas (which may have repercussions for us in a later chapter), but we got out of the castle and found the camp of some other mice in a tree in the courtyard.

So far, we love this game. It’s the first game in a long while that has my wife asking when we can play again. The narrative of the campaign is part of the draw; we all want to find out what happens in the next scenario and whether our mice will prevail and save the kingdom. But we also like the quick game play–with some experience, you can probably play one scenario in about an hour, which is coincidentally about the limit on the attention span of our 6 year old. (In our first play, the game took a bit longer as we looked up rules and made sure we got things right. In the second play, the game moved significantly faster.) To be clear, though, this is not just a children’s game. It offers similar decision-making to other cooperative games like Pandemic and most of the skills and character abilities require a fair bit of reading comprehension. While the game box says ages 7+, I think a group of average seven-year-olds would have a hard time figuring this game out by themselves. Our son likes playing the game with us, but if left to his own devices, he would probably just make up his own game with the components.

I’ve seen some comments online that fault this game for being a bad dungeon crawl game, but I think that’s a case of misapplying one’s expectations. I went into this game expecting a cooperative game, not a dungeon crawler, and my expectations weren’t shattered. There’s a certain “dungeon” aspect to the game–your characters “level up,” the game has a campaign mode, you fight monsters, etc. But the heart of the game is about time and resource management–do you risk searching for loot when there’s a chance that more bad guys will arrive and move the time closer to ending the game? A more accurate concern might be the amount of randomness created by the dice rolls and card draws. Conceivably, you could have the cheese clock fill up in just one round of bad guy actions. But you could just as conceivably never have the cheese clock advance. The luck factor felt balanced in our plays, and we blamed (or praised) our own decisions, not the dice.

The only real complaint I have with the game is the number of dice in the box. The game comes with 5 dice, but even in the first scenario, we found situations where we were rolling 4 dice to attack  and needed 4 dice to defend. The game would move faster if the player rolling defense could roll at the same time as the attacking player, instead of having to wait for the dice to be re-collected and passed around the table. (Although, to be fair, my son likes to hoard dice, so the dice don’t really remain out in the general play area.)

But the number of dice is a minor quibble in an otherwise awesome game. I’m not sure how much replay the game will have after we beat all eleven of the scenarios, but if it takes us a couple of tries to beat each scenario, we’re looking at 20+ plays before we’re “done” with the game, and that’s pretty good value for the money. By then, there might even be an expansion!

Some extra links:

• An interview with the designer by Board Game Muse.
• A review by Josh Edwards.
• A review from No High Scores.
• A review from Drake’s Flames.

 

. . . Painting Mice & Mystics Minis

Well, I finished my first minis of 2013–only 4 months into the year. On the bright side, they turned out okay, and my oldest son is excited about the chance to finally play the game. These were a pretty straightforward, quick paint job. (Well, quick for me… which is to say, 4 months…) I basically painted base coats over white primer and then washed with GW washes. A tiny bit of drybrushing and some Krylon sealer, and I was done.

Here they are (camera work probably needs to be improved, along with the painting):

My wife’s favorite mini of this bunch.

 

Another shot of the archer.

Las cucarachas! Love that this game has mini roaches.

 

Bad guy rat.

Another angle of the rat baddie.

Wizard and rogue mice.

The archer and the warrior.

Creepy bug thing.

I like the way his carapace turned out.

Smith and priestess.

All of ‘em.

I liked the way his cloak looks, too.

 

. . . Using a Wet Palette (and Revisiting Old Games)

Today, I used this guy’s instructions to make a wet palette. I’m kind of a sucker for painting “tricks.” (I use Magic Wash made from floor cleaner; I dip with MinWax, etc.) So the idea of using a wet palette and keeping my paint more liquid while I was painting seemed like a fun, new trick. But, oh, it’s so much more than a trick. Before using the wet palette, I thought its main advantage might be helping to keep the color I was painting flowing. But once I started painting with it, I realized its bigger advantage: it keeps all of my other paints nice and liquid. That means when I accidentally paint a little bit of silver on top of my dude’s skin, I can just get a little bit of that flesh color and paint over my mistake. No more remembering which color I was using; no more re-shaking paint bottles and re-mixing paint and flow enhancer. That stuff I used 30 minutes ago? It’s still nice and fresh. I painted a whole mouse (for Mice & Mystics) without having to re-open a paint container! (Well, that’s not entirely true; I still have some left-over GW paints that I refuse to pour out of their stupid, little pots, and I had to re-open them when I needed just a bit more bronze.) In any case, this simple trick made my painting a lot more fun today.

On the gaming front, things have been mostly routine for the Manglers. We continue to play Pendragon, and we will be resuming FFG’s Warhammer next month.

Last night, we were without two Manglers, so I dragged out some card games from my college days and inflicted them upon Billy and Paul. We played a couple of games of Guillotine and three games of Chez Geek (although this link goes to some new, fancy version of the game–I have the old one, with the typos and mismatched colors, and job-back errors, and such).

Guillotine is a pretty straight-forward game that was made by WotC back in the late ’90s. You have a hand of action cards, and each turn you play one, and then drop the blade on the first noble in line. You collect the noble for points, and the winner is the person with the most valuable noble heads. A good game to play with Les Miserables coming out on DVD soon. The action cards let you shift who is in the front of the line, make some types of nobles worth more points, etc. It’s a beer-and-pretzels game that’s pretty light on strategy, but fills time nicely. I love the artwork on the cards, and it’s just fun having to decide whether you want to off the annoying priest or the piss boy.

Chez Geek is another light, filler game. (The art in this one is also cool, being done by executive geek in charge of art John Kovalic). In this game, each player is a slacker living in one room of a shared apartment. Your goal is to do the least with your life, whiling away your time with booze, nookie and . . . cats. Everyone gets a “job” which dictates how much free time you have, how much you can buy each turn, and just how slack you have to be (points) to win the game. Each turn, you play cards from your hand to call your friends over to hang out, to inflict obnoxious people on your roommates, to buy stuff, and to partake in inane activities (stupid TV shows, blowing bubbles, attending sci-fi cons, etc.). Whoever reaches their slack goal first, wins. Like Guillotine, the game is quite luck dependent. If you have a job with a lot of income and a starting hand filled with things to buy, you’re in good shape. If you have a job that doesn’t give you much free time and a hand full of activities, you probably aren’t going to win. But the fun thing about Chez Geek isn’t the gameplay as much as it is the story that you weave. By the end of each session, you’ve really determined a lot about your fictional roomies. In a way, I could see this game being the prelude to a crazy, college-based game of Fiasco:

“Ok, so at the end of the card game, Billy was a booze-loving drummer with cat allergies. Paul was a straight-edge teaching assistant with a fondness for pets. And I was a down-on-his luck web designer with no money and a friend who kept drinking my booze and eating my food. You wake up one morning, and (Fiasco set-up) the cops are at the door and there’s a dead body in the shower. Go!”

Hmm…. wonder if the Manglers are up for Fiasco again….

Another Guillotine review here.
A couple of  Chez Geek reviews here and here.

 

. . . Playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition

Got the chance last night to run a session of the latest incarnation of Warhammer–the version produced by Fantasy Flight Games. This isn’t a complete review, just some first impressions.

My first impression is that there’s a lot to keep track of–cards, counters, dice, progress tracks, etc. I think that the ease with which we use these fiddly bits will increase as we get used to them, but they seemed like a lot to keep track of last night.

My second impression was about the dice. I thought that reading the dice would be difficult, but it actually wound up being pretty easy. Ideally, I think this is a game where each player would interpret the dice for their own character–translating the effects of good and bad rolls into story. But for our first session, I did most of the translating, and it still worked okay.

The only real complaint I have is with running combat. As with most games, the GM’s side is more tricky than the players’ side. Keeping track of separate pools of points for each group of monsters, and recharge rates, and health (especially using the wound cards) was all a bit much, and I realized I missed a lot. Hopefully, this will also get easier.

I’ve seen a lot of complaints that this game is too much of a boardgame, and I can definitely understand that complaint. But once we started rolling dice, everything fell into place, and it just felt like Warhammer again. (Due in part to some really good adventure writing by FFG’s authors.)

 

. . . Looking Forward to 2013

So, last year’s resolutions went okay on some fronts, and abysmally on others. Here are some thoughts about what I’d like to accomplish this year:

1. More gaming with friends and family.
I tried to do this last year and did okay, but I’d like to do better. My oldest son is almost six, and he’s starting to read, so I think his ability to play games will increase in the next few months. I also still have a ton of 2-player games to play with my wife, and I’d still like to have the occasional game night with other folks–folks with whom I don’t normally play games.

2. Keep painting!
While I felt like 49 minis last year was a bit weak (mainly given that most of this painting came in frantic bursts), I recognize that it’s a pretty viable number. I’d like to hit 52 this year–one mini a week. But I wouldn’t complain if that number was even higher.

3. Do more with what I have.
I have too many games. Board, card, RPG, computer, etc.–they all stack up to more games than I have time to play. So, I really don’t need more games. And since I still have some outstanding Kickstarters that will be arriving throughout the first part of the year, I have even more games coming in. So, the plan is to not buy anything that is not directly related to games that I am currently playing. Maybe I can catch up on playing more of what I already own, and then I can make some decisions about what is worth keeping and what is worth letting go to make more space for new games in 2014! Included in this resolution is also reading more of the stuff I already own. I did horribly last year with increasing the amount I read outside of prepping for classes.

4. Produce more; consume less.
This is my catch-all resolution for doing more useful stuff with my time. I need to get this blog back to a once-a-week status. I’ve got other ideas for things to write, and I have a ton of ideas for ways to change how I teach. So, part of my goal is to spend less time looking at what other people produce, and more time making my own stuff. Not sure what this will include yet.

Not a resolution, but here’s stuff I’d like to try that’s more directly related to gaming: (Not sure how much of this will happen in one year.)

RPGs
WFRP3 = Got The Enemy Within campaign for Christmas, and I’d like to run it.
Adventurer Conqueror King = I’ve supported the Dwimmermount kickstarter and whenever it comes out, I’d like to run it. Probably something for 2014.
The One Ring = The Tales from Wilderland campaign for this looks really fun.
Night’s Black Agents = I need a good bit of time to prep for this, but it looks like a cool, spy meets vampire game.
13th Age = Not sure what I’d do with this, but it seems to take everything I liked about 4e and drop the rest. 4e without a tactical map? Yes, please!
Lost in Space = Yeah, not sure what to call this, and I don’t even know what system I’d use, but I have an idea for a campaign based around Spelljammer meets Lost, with elves.
Pendragon = Gotta get through the Great Campaign! 25 years down… a ton to go.

Minis Games
Dreadball = Got the little dudes assembled and washed and ready to prime as soon as the temp gets above 50.
Force on Force (Ambush Alley) = Almost done painting a bunch of 15mm guys for this. (Although now I’m thinking 28mm would be a better choice…)
DBA v3.0 = Someday this will release, and when it does, I will play it.
SAGA = I’ve got some vikings who need to be assembled, and some dice to obtain, before I can play this.
Song of Blades and Heroes = This seems like a great game for all those random fantasy minis I have laying around. (Possibly something to play with the kid?)

That’s a lot to accomplish in a year. Gonna be a busy one! Happy New Year!

 

. . . Looking Back at 2012

Well, the year is almost over. Time for the yearly wrap-up.

Last year, I made the following resolutions. Here’s how I did on them:
1. Play more games with my family.
In 2011, I only had listed one game that I played with my wife. This year, I played 14. So that’s a definite improvement.

2. Paint more miniatures.
I didn’t keep track of how much I painted in 2011, but I managed to eke out 49 painted minis this year. That’s an okay number, but I’m not sure that it’s a significant improvement over 2011′s numbers.

3. Stay dedicated to Pendragon.
The Manglers have done well with this goal. By limiting our non-Pendragon games to one-shots and the occasional DCC RPG adventure, we’ve stayed focused on Pendragon, with most of us seeing our original knight’s heirs coming of age and becoming our new PCs. We still have at least another 1-2 years of play left in this campaign.

4. Play games with people outside my group.
Didn’t do well on this goal at all. Aside from some end of the year games with Colt, I don’t think I’ve played with anyone new this year.

5. Read more.
Maybe better than 2011, but no significant changes. Made it through a couple more Appendix N novels (and failed to blog about them), and a couple of other fantasy books, but still bogged down on my Presidential reading.

6. Update this blog more regularly.
Only 9 posts this year. That’s less than one a month–far off my goal of once a week. (I had 21 posts in 2011, so I’m way off the mark this year.) But I now have a much more realistic idea of how often I can post.

I didn’t get a chance to play any DBA this year. Scheduling was weird, and I was hesitant to play when the new rules are supposed to be out soon.

Board Game Count

Conquest of Nerath (3/8 0-1)
Cosmic Cows (5/25 1-2)
Deadwood (3/8 0-2)
Dominion (11/8 1-3)
Dungeon! (11/12 1-0, 12/3 1-0)
Game of Thrones LCG (3/29 0-1)
Infiltration (7/19 0-3)
Legendary (11/29 1-2)
Miskatonic School for Girls (3/15 0-1, 3/24 0-1)
Quarriors (7/12 0-2, 7/19 0-2)
Risk: Legacy (1/21 0-2, 1/27 2-1, 6/29 1-1)
Split Decision (7/13 2-0, 7/22 0-2)
Super Showdown (5/25 1-1)

I calculated the end of year point totals as (Wins/Losses)*total games played in an attempt to weight the number of games played, and not just the pure win/loss record. (I’m still not entirely happy with this way of calculating. Despite Billy winning last year, I feel like this method gives me an unfair advantage because I keep the stats on my own playing, and all of the games I play involve me.) Below are the actual W/L record, followed by the point totals and finishing place, and the overall win percentage–for comparison’s sake. I had a 2% better win percentage this year.

Me: 11-27 (15.481 / 1st / 29%)
Billy: 7-15 (10.266 / 3rd / 32%)
Dirk: 1-6 (1.166 / 6th / 14%)
Paul: 6-18 (8 / 4th / 25%)
Robert: 3-9 (4 / 5th / 25%)
Bobbijean 6-8 (10.5 / 2nd / 43%)

On the RPG front, we played Pendragon, Dungeon Crawl Classics, tremulous, Fiasco, and D&D Next. Fewer games than the year before, but much more focus. I’ll try to get the New Year’s predictions up before we get too far into the New Year.

 

. . . Playing Legendary

Legendary Card Game

So a couple of weeks ago, the Manglers -1 (plus a friendly sit-in) tried Legendary, the new Marvel deck-building game from Upper Deck. The only game I’ve previously played from Upper Deck was the Marvel Super-Hero Squad CCG (which my son and I found amusing, but the collectible nature of it made it too expensive to pursue for long). I was, frankly, a bit surprised that Upper Deck was entering the non-collectible card game market, but given the expandable nature of deck-building games, I’m sure they can make their money.

Legendary comes in a large box that easily holds the cards from this set, and will presumably hold the cards from at least a couple of expansions. It comes with some dividers to place between the cards, which does a fine job of separating the many stacks of cards, but isn’t nearly as useful as the Dominion boxes with their separate, labelled  sections. The cards themselves are of decent quality (although they aren’t exactly playing-card grade, so they’d probably benefit from sleeving). The art looks like it’s straight from a comic, and is properly evocative of the superheroic genre. (The art was all commissioned for this game, so you won’t actually find it in a comic, but it looks like it could be in one.) The game also comes with a board, divided into sections for hero cards, villain cards, draw decks, and a knocked-out pile.

Look at all that empty space for more cards!

The only downside to the game we all could agree on was setup time. It takes a while initially to unpack the cards into their appropriate stacks, but that’s a one-time investment of time. However, for each game, a number of separate stacks of cards (about 10 or so) must be pulled from the box and shuffled into two separate decks (one for heroes and one for villains). I should note that after the first game, there’s very little guidance for what heroes and villains should be matched–a point I’ll return to in a bit. The pulling and shuffling of cards is a bit time-consuming, but it gets worse after the first game, when all of the cards on the board (including a big mess of cards in the knockout pile) and each player’s hands and decks must be separated into their respective piles–about 10, plus the 4 stacks of basic cards (SHIELD agents, wounds, etc.) Then all of those piles that aren’t being used in the next game have to be replaced in the box, new piles drawn and shuffled, and the whole process starts over. Admittedly, this process is part of any deckbuilder, but it felt particularly slow in this game.

Game-play itself, however, is quick and fun. Each game has a Master Villain and a scheme. (A big part of our fun was in creating the story behind the game–just why was Magneto helping a Skrull invasion? or why was Loki robbing a bank?) The goal of the game for the players is two-fold: 1) Defeat the Master-Villain four times before he completes his evil plan, and 2) Have the most victory points in your deck. The villain and scheme dictate how the bad guys can win–in one of our games, it involved the villains carrying away a certain number of bystanders. If the villain completes his plan before the players can defeat him four times, the villain wins and the players all lose.

In each turn, you play one villain card off the villain deck into the villain row (moving other villains over to new locations, and ultimately to their escape from the city), and play your hand in the order you choose. Some cards gain power from cards played earlier in the round, so there’s a small amount of strategy in determining what cards to play first. Each of your cards gives you Recruiting power, Attack power, both, or sometimes some other ability. The abilities are thematic for the characters. Deadpool, for example, often has abilities based on random choice or random draws; Storm does more damage to people on rooftops, etc. You add up your Recruiting power and use it to “buy” new heroes from the hero deck. You add up your Attack power and use it to fight the Master-Villain or minor villains from the villain deck. Defeated villains (and their kidnapped Bystanders if they had them) go into your victory pile and will  count for points at the end of the game. Some cards from the villain deck will be Twist cards that cause something to happen with the Master-Villain–he might knock out some heroes, kidnap some bystanders, beef up his minions, etc. At the end of your turn, you put all of the cards from your hand (played and unplayed) into your discard pile and draw 6 more.

My whole group really enjoyed the game (minus the tedious setup between games), and we played three games. In two of the games, we defeated the Master-Villain, and in one game, we were crushed. In that game, we chose the hero cards for that game based on which characters we liked, and chose the Master-Villain and his scheme randomly. What we wound up with was a Master-Villain who made each other villain in the game tougher paired with a number of heroes who had very little attack power. We really had no chance in that game, and there’s where the problem I mentioned earlier comes in. If you randomly decide on heroes and villains, you have a chance of having a really difficult (possibly unbeatable?) set-up. If you choose which cards are in play for each side, you could never lose. I wish that the designer had offered some more set-up choices that work well or some advice about what combinations to avoid. It would be cool to have some additional cards made to look like comic book covers, with each card giving a scenario title and listing which heroes and villains are involved. You could randomly choose a scenario card for set-up and have a better guarantee that the game would work well.

Overall, though, the two complaints I have about the game (time for set-up and randomness of scenarios) are minor compared to the fun of the game itself. It’s the first deck-builder since Dominion that I’ve really wanted to play again, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s coming up in the expansions. (Daredevil and Moon Knight? Yes, please!)

Other Reviews:
Board & Base
Video Review by the Vasels
Crits Happen