MEK OP Game Night: Mage Knight Board Game

One of my very first posts was a lament for the absence of a high-quality "hex-crawl" board game -- that is, a board game that could simulate the experience of taking a medium sized expedition (say a mercenary company with a few dozen adventuring soldiers) and allow them to explore a region of undiscovered territory. Computer games have offered quite a few variations in this theme (including the HoMM series, the Warlords franchise, the original King's Bounty and its remake, and several similar games. Most of these aren't exactly to my taste, with minimal emphasis on simulation and a tendency to reduce combat to the "stack of a hundred dragons" approach that feels much satisfying to me than the kind of detailed and realistic large-scale combat you'd find in Total War or Mount and Blade. A good recent historical entry in the genre was the indie title Expeditions: Conquistador, which provides a simple but satisfying implementation of some of the major logistical choices that a real expedition would face. Even then, its combat was more squad-tactical than operational, with the result that you can end up conquering the Aztec empire with a platoon of barely over a dozen men -- whereas even Cortes needed several hundred Spaniards.

This Saturday for MEK OP, we took a shot at learning the Mage Knight Board Game, a modern-feeling treatment of the same genre as old favorite Magic Realm. "Modern", in this case, means that it replaces most of the old dice-rolling event resolution mechanics with a zero-paperwork deck-building approach that feels more like playing a puzzle game than an RPG.

The world's largest game of solitaire.

The fantasy tropes in the game are fairly predictable and derivative (yep, you're on a map full of rampaging orcs and dragons, and you need to capture castles and delve into dungeons, check), but the puzzle game mechanics with the cards feels uniquely well-designed relative to other similar systems. There's an intensely high level of pressure to optimally use each combination of cards, and a wide range of different permutations for the ways in which they can be used. In some respects it would be a good choice for card-counting poker experts, since being constantly aware of the exact contents of your "deed deck" makes it possible plan out your next five turns like a chess grandmaster. This results in a game that feels diametrically opposed to the randomness of a classical 70's-era hex crawl like Magic Realm, despite the enormous amount of shared thematic DNA.

There are a number of game aspects that can drive a simulationist to the point of despair, if you think about them for too long. There's virtually no possibility of death here, with the worst game situation being set of wounds that require a few turns to discard. In a single night, you can walk through three towns, hire multiple military units who are mysteriously awake at 3:00 am to go on dangerous adventures, and fight two major battles. You can conquer an entire keep single-handed without the need for any army, then travel ten miles to do the same thing again, all within 24 hours. Your character is some kind of empowered hero who can travel day and night without the need for rest -- which is fine in itself, but when you pick up additional units of mere mortals, you can actually use their abilities to move even faster. There's no economic system here, so all your troops work for free. Every dungeon has exactly one resident monster (out of five possible types), every keep has exactly one defender, every starting hero gets to recruit one unit, and every monastery protects exactly one artifact. It's all very neat and precise, which makes the puzzle game enormously predictable and strategically deep, but also makes it hard to lose yourself in a plausible narrative of play.

There's also such an emphasis on iconographic information (rather than note-taking and text) that the game ends up with a huge multi-table footprint full of wasted space. That huge board with 100 numbers at the top of the photo above? That's just to record your experience point totals. In an older RPG-style game with a record sheet, it would require a two-digit number in pencil and an experience table. Here, it takes 700 square centimenters of high-quality cardboard just to display a single token occupying one box with the number you care about.

Overall, it's probably best to think of this as a deck-builder card game with a large number of auxiliary systems, rather than a hex-crawl game with a card-based sub-mechanic. The majority of time invested in this game is going to revolve around trying to figure out how to manage your hand and play cards at the opportune moment. Unlike Magic Realm, where every different hero and map situation requires a radically different style of play (and generates a unique story along the way), Mage Knight is about each player performing a predictable sequence of universal tasks with near-perfect efficiency.

I can't say I dislike a game that has this much strategy under the hood. A good player could run in circles around the level of play we were able to reach on Saturday night, and there's an enormous time and practice investment required to become a skilled player. By the end of the night, everyone was taking ten minutes for each turn, trying to milk every last drop of utility out of a dwindling deck.

I still find myself looking for a combat system that creates a narrative dynamic that resembles some kind of styled approximation of real medieval combat, rather than playing a card-matching minigame. I don't think that this will replace any of my interest in finding a more simulationist treatment of the same topic. I should probably haul out my Fantastic Frontiers rules, and try to take a third stab at writing them up in a coherent form. There are definitely a few features of the rules for Mage Knight that I like enough to steal, such as the reputation track.

By the time we called the game around midnight, we had discovered two cities (the end-game objectives) but were nowhere close to being able to assault one of them with any prospect of success. I'd say that playing this through to the end will take at least six hours, and it might be wise to start early next time I bring it.