The answer to this quandary may very well be Mice and Mystics, an endearing co-operative fantasy adventure game inspired, in large part, by the Mouse Guard comic book and subsequent RPG. Like all good campaign settings, M&M has an intriguing back-story. Players take on the role of various fantasy archetypes, such as cleric, wizard, warrior and thief, who are all are all in the orbit of a royal family living in an expansive castle. When rivals of the royal family stage a coup, the group is captured and imprisoned, forcing them to transform into tiny mice in order to escape!
In their quest to restore the rightful rulers to the throne and regain their original forms, the group must navigate through the castle, which is now twenty times its normal size! Along the way they're forced to contend with a host of deadly traps and battle a horde of vicious vermin, including cockroaches, rats and centipedes. Only by working in tandem will our heroes survive the perils of their over-sized new world.
Game play in Mice and Mystics is pretty straightforward. When you move into a new location, plastic miniatures representing your character and various enemies are dropped onto lavishly-illustrated grid boards which facilitate movement and battles. The game then turns into a simplified version of D&D tactical combat, with cards representing the various characters and threats getting shuffled together and drawn at random to determine their initiative order.
Naturally, every character has a unique combination of speed, hit points, and methods for dishing out damage, whether it be melee, archery or magic. Characters are further distinguished by different weapons and special maneuvers that let you break the regular rules of the game. On a turn you can move and attack, or vice versa; the effectiveness of which is determined by rolling customized dice for additional movement points, swords for melee hits, bows for ranged hits, shields for blocks and, of course, cheese! This latter result is a particularly cool consolation prize, since it lets players collect a cheese token, which can be spent on fueling special abilities or unlocking new ones.
As battles wind down, you can search your environment for more equipment, but you can't tarry too long. At the end of every action round, an increment of time passes and when this clock fills up, new threats appear. So, needless to say, the pace of the game is rather brisk.
In our game Cheryl was Tilda the Healer, Trevor was Maginos the Wizard, Rachael was Flich the Thief and I took on the role of Nez the Warrior. The game threw us right into the action, just seconds after we'd transformed into mice. On that first tile, out goal was to defeat the rat-guards and sneak out through the floor grate:
This accomplished, we soon found ourselves in a subterranean sewer, attempting to ford across a waterway, all the while being assaulted by hordes of voracious cockroaches!
After clearing this obstacle and battling our way through a corridor, we opted to go top-side to the kitchen in an attempt to liberate a potential ally:
Unfortunately that's where our adventure came to an end. Even though we dispatched the roach infestation with considerable aplomb, the event clock ushered in the kitchen's terrifying guardian and the player's arch-nemesis: Brodie the Cat. Regrettably, the colossal feline made short work of us diminutive mice.
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There are a slew of dungeon crawl options out there, chief among them being Fantasy Flight's Descent: Second Edition. Descent is great and all, but Mice and Mystics has one primary advantage: no one has to be the overlord and play the monsters. Everyone plays a mouse character and everyone tries to work together to win!The down side is that games which use this "programmed movement" system for the enemies can often generate a lot of rules questions, either because the game isn't play-tested enough or the rule-book is vague and / or poorly organized. And while Mice and Mystics isn't the hazy mess that Castle Ravenloft and Ashardalon can be, it does have its own issues which caused us to go spelunking into the manual to seek answers to some pretty obvious questions.
For example: is diagonal movement possible on those irregular cobblestone floors? Also, as part of their "programming", enemies are supposed to close on the closest characters and attack, but what do they do when multiple figures share the same space? Or several are equidistant from one another? From what we could gather, it's based on initiative order, but I'm still not 100% sure.
Then there are the scenario or location-specific rules, like the ones governing the actions of Brodie the Cat. The programming doesn't account for all of the possible in-game variables that can occur, so we often found ourselves putting the action on hold to go rooting around for an answer. Even when we found the relevant section, the rules were so general that we were forced to apply the sort of group interpretation usually reserved for deciphering the glyphs on ancient stone tablets.
Otherwise the game is pretty solid. When new environments are revealed, players have to think tactically, leverage all of their character's advantages and work in close conjunction in order to survive. I really love the branching options in a game, which forces the group to make interesting decisions on the spot. Do we take this dangerous detour to earn a potential reward or just make a bee-line for the exit?
And, as evidenced by the photos, the designers clearly spared no expense where it comes to the game's lavish production design. The tiles and cards feature evocative artwork, the dice are durable and cool, the cheese tokens are super-cute and the plastic figures are incredibly detailed. In fact, if you plug "painted Mice and Mystics miniatures" into the ol' Google machine you'll marvel at the amazing results that talented artists have produced from these tiny l'il hunks of plastic.
I know this might be sacrilege, but I think I'd be more likely to play Mice and Mystics over Descent: Second Edition. It's an easier game to jump in a game of M&M because the combat is more straightforward, the branching choices are just as frequent, the art design is more unique and no-one gets stuck playing the asshole who's trying to murder everyone else. Interestingly enough, it's the last element that gives Descent a strong rebuttal since the threats are represented by one of the players. As a result, the monster "A.I." is a lot stronger and you won't waste time trying to interpret some vague instructions on a creature card.
Still, Mice and Mystics is a wonderful way to introduce imaginative kids and gaming neophytes to the deeper aspects of RPG's. As such, this one scores five pips out of six with a tilt down into a cockroach-infested basement!
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