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.

Tabletop Wish List

My wife asked me to create a list of games I'm considering purchasing, for the benefit of anyone who asks her what I might want as a gift. Here's a selection of things on my radar. Unfortunately, many of the games I really want are either out of print or too expensive to make a sensible gift. But there are certainly some exceptions I can include. I'll update this list as I acquire games, so it remains current.

Card Games
Star Realms (Expansions: Bases and Battleships, Events, Fleets and Fortresses, Heroes) - This fast and easy game is essentially a PvP variant of Ascension. It comes with a variety of custom decks, but each of them is individually affordable in the $10 to $15 range.

Core Worlds (Expansions: Galactic Orders) -  A more complicated and technical treatment of the same theme, this is also a relatively more expensive game at around $30. It takes much longer to play, and gameplay involves balancing a larger decision matrix than most other card games.

Mini Games
Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures - The game itself looks moderately fun, and the ship miniatures could be reappropriated for a other gaming purposes. Core game is around $25, expansion packs go for $10-15.

Memoir '44 - Looks like a fun WW2 implementation of the Battle Lore-style of simple wargame. Runs around $40.

Modern Euro-style Standards
Small World (+ expansions) - A Euro-style wargame with a light fantasy feel. Used copies are pretty common, will run around $40 new.

Pandemic (+ expansions) - Well-known cooperative game. Relatively inexpensive (around $25), and available at many general-purpose retailers like Target or Walmart.

Eclipse (+ expansions) - A multiplayer area-control game with some obvious Catan similarities, but more directly player conflict and a science fiction theme. Somewhat expensive ($60 or more), maybe better to purchase a used copy.

Stronghold - A medium-complexity castle-siege wargame using wood blocks for pieces. Shouldn't be too expensive, maybe $40 or so. I think it's only available used right now.

Classic Games
Dragon Rage - Given a nicely updated re-release, after decades of being off the market. Hard to find new, should run around $50 used. A traditional asymmetric hex wargame; think OGRE with dragons.

Britannia - A simple historical game that I remember playing back in college, running over a millennium or so of British history. Somewhat expensive in the newer Fantasy Flight edition. The old editions from the 80s are dirt cheap on Ebay ($20 or so), and still playable, although not as impressive as the new one.

SPQR - A nice Roman-era wargame that's hard to find these days. Please don't pay $845 for this on Amazon (the current list price!)

Mega-Sized Games (none of these come cheap)
Mage Knight Board Game - Hybrid deck-builder and 4x game that uses cards for movement and combat actions. Features a build-as-you-go modular giant-hex map like Magic Realm. I already found a used version of this online, but there are two smaller expansions I wouldn't mind having and would make reasonable gifts.

Twilight Imperium - Fantasy Flight's deluxe multiplayer sci-fi wargame, this takes hours to complete and works best with a large group of players.

Runewars - Another Fantasy Flight behemoth with loads of plastic and cardboard pieces. It looks fairly complicated, but supposedly it plays fast like an Axis and Allies clone when you get the hang of it.

Battle of the Five Armies - An adaption of the War of the Ring game to the final battle of the Hobbit, using some of the same game mechanics and game pieces.

Empires in Arms - Out of print for years, but you can still find used versions. Desperately in need of a reprint edition. Also comes in a computer edition.

MEK OP Game Night: WotR with Expansion

This Saturday we amazing had no Warhammer tables going, and so instead we set up for a 4-person War of the Ring showdown. I played Free Peoples for a change this time, and most of the other players had at least some familiarity with the system. I elected to add most of the optional characters and minions (and their dice) from the expansion set, but not any of the optional Fellowship cards or other rules.

As with my past experience, the game fits rather perfectly into a four-hour time slot. The game was resolved by a very narrow margin, driving through Mordor in a single turn due to military pressure, with a final corruption level of 9 at the end of the game. A bad tile draw for hunt damage would have resulted in a loss. Instead, we finished with only the second Free Peoples win I've ever seen. Virtually every member of the Fellowship ended up dead (or for the Merry and Pippin, lost in the wastes north of Mordor), and Minas Tirith went down before the Fellowship had even reached Lorien. Things were getting frantic by the end, and the final turn featured the use of all three elven rings!

And yet somehow I won with a deck
containing only two heroes

Then today (Sunday) my wife and brother-in-law played a few rounds of the DC Deckbuilding Game. That's just what's it's called, which perhaps suggests it's not the most original concept in the word. It's a simple single-resource system with streamlined play relative to other similar games. It probably compares most directly with Ascension, although thematically it seems intended to compete with Marvel's more complicated deckbuilder, Legendary. Overall it had the same basic qualities of other games in the genre, but the art was clean and set-up was easy. My BIL was relatively pleased with the thematic integration of the DC universe, which I gather is based on the New 52 reboot of the primary comic titles. There's probably some sense in which I'd feel more comfortable with a more classic Silver Age implementation of the theme that resembles the stuff I remember from my youth, but that's not likely to ever happen. In any event, all the official comic versions of DC heroes are likely to be washed away by the arrival of the new movies in the next decade, which will create new definitive versions of the familiar roster.

I won both games, as Hawkman each time. But as with most deckbuilders it's mostly a matter of luck to grab an early lead and then simply not doing stupid things to squander it.