Bored? Game! Mice and Mystics

The first thing you really have to do with Mice and Mystics, if you want to play it properly, is select a strong reader to read out the introduction and the chapter’s story. It’s a very charming and well-written preface to set the scene for what is quite an involved adventure, but if you skip this step then you’re really missing out on immersion and the whole point of the board game.

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Mice and Mystics is very much about storytelling, storycrafting and adventuring. The whole game is structured around a Storybook, which is an adventure split into chapters and beautifully illustrated. A chapter is essentially one game of Mice, with each chapter fleshing out the overall story and having its own rules and conditions. A chapter will tell you what boards to use, any special conditions and more importantly, how to win and get the mice successfully through to the next stage of their adventure. If you’re dedicated, you can play each chapter with a group of the same friends as a campaign, working your way through the whole story, recording whether you did extra side missions in order to get achievements that help you later in the tale and ultimately trying to achieve the perfect happy ending.

If it sounds complicated, it kind of is. This was my first experience playing something of this complexity – when I say this complexity, I mean something that had far too many tokens to count, a thick manual and a twenty-five minute Youtube video that gave ‘the basics’ of how to play the game.

The adventure begins. Step 1: Escape from the dungeons.
The adventure begins. Step 1: Escape from the dungeons.

It took a while to understand the various steps and conditions of play, especially because the chapter called for four characters to be in play and there were only two of us. But essentially, it didn’t matter because the game was so co-operative that it became a blur of who was controlling what mouse and it didn’t matter anyway because we were both working together. The storybook we played, Sorrow and Rememberance, is about a good king who chooses a wicked witch of a wife, who then proceeds to terrorise everyone. She throws a band of folk loyal to the crown in the dungeon, including the king’s own son. However, they come up with a plan to transform themselves into mice and escape… but when you’re small, your problems only get bigger.

I’ll try to summarise the steps of the game. To start with, you set up the board according to the instructions presented in the chapter. In the chapter we played, there were three boards, totalling six locations because the boards could be flipped to represent paths inside the walls of rooms or in sewers, or rooms of the castle itself. We had to traverse through all six locations (although granted, one of them was optional) in order to get to the end of the game but you can’t move locations without clearing the room of enemies, which are dictated by a card drawn from a set or by the conditions set in the chapter.

We're surrounded!
We’re surrounded!

Each mouse is incredibly cute, their card has their backstory on it – a nice touch – and they also have a set of stats which can be used to fight and defend against attacks. You roll dice to determine whether attacks have been successful or not, for your mice and for the enemies in the room. It took a while to get the hang of this but then we got really into the story, even crying out “Noooo! Tilda!” when our healer mouse sustained too many wounds and was ‘captured’ by the enemy. There were plenty of rules in the game: rules for determining where and when enemies popped up, rules for determining the order of attack, rules for determining movement which changed depending on if you were attempting to move in water or not, rules for determining the behaviour of enemies and so on.

Don’t start this game unless you’re ready to dedicate a solid block of time to it. Apart from the time to set up and understand the game, it takes quite a lot of time to clear each room of enemies – even on ‘easy’ mode there were at least three enemies to start off with and if you were unlucky enough to roll cheese for the enemies, you filled up a wheel which could release even more enemies into the room. The odds are really against your mice so you do have to work together well and plan your strategy. But that only makes you feel even more involved in what happens to them, and when you reach a new location and have to read another paragraph to set the scene, you quickly become absorbed and appreciative of the extra detail. They stop feeling like little plastic figures and start feeling like real manifestations of your imagination.

How are we going to get out of this one?
How are we going to get out of this one?

When we finished the chapter after three hours of play (give or take 40 minutes to set up and watch the instructional Youtube video) it was with a sigh of relief, not because we were glad it was over but because we were happy that our mice had survived the trip from dungeon, through sewers, around the kitchen avoiding the deadly tomcat Brodie, back into the walls, out across the courtyard trying to avoid the wrath of the Dastardly Old Crow, finally clearing the place of enemies and making it to the haven of a gnarled oak in the corner. The end revealed the continuation of the story and teased another adventure, although I might leave it a while before I do the next one. Hopefully it will go faster this time, but I expect my love for the tiny characters to only grow more.

Designer: Jerry Hawthorne
Publisher: Plaid Hat Games
Mechanic: Co-op, Role Play
Number of Players: 1-4
Length of Game: 90-120 minutes
Complexity: Medium-Hard


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