Mage Knight Review
Hello and welcome to my second review. This one is about the new WizKids fantasy andventure game "Mage Knight". It's a game for 1 to 4 player in a common fantasy world. Each player plays one of four available mage characters and tries to boost the abilities and powers of the chosen character to become able to fullfill the final goal for the chosen szenario. In the rulebook you find cooperative and competative szenarios as well as solo szenarios in different variants. Sound like a Runebound clone to you? No it isn't. This game is what Runbound wanted to be but never was.
The Components:
In one word: fantastic. I love the components and there are many of them in the big gamebox. The cards are thick enogh and have a structured surface. They feel good in your hands but it is not easy to quickly go through your handcards because for they are not slippery enough. The map tiles are also of good quality and in my copy of the game all of them were in perfect shape. The markers and small pieces are well designed and can be used without any problems. The figures are also very good, solid and *tadaaa* prepainted. I love prepainted minis in a boardgame because I have really no skill to paint them by myself. The town figures are furnished with the well known heroclickz bases. Last but not least: The artwork is awesome. The paintings on cards, maptiles and markers are really good looking and after a few rounds the game looks very impressive on the game table.
The Rules
Mage Knight comes with two Rulebooks: The walktrough, which teaches you the gameplay during a first, easier and shorter szenario by playing, and a traditional rulebook as reference for rule questions. They are both well written and very usable. The rules themself are good and clear but complex and fiddly in some cases. On the maptiles are many different locations you can interact with in different ways. 386
Some must be encountered some initiate a fight if you go to them and on other ones you can choose if you want to fight or make another movement to the next hexagon. Some markers for these location are placed face up some face down and some only face up if it is day and face down if it is night. In your first games you have to look again and again in the rulebook to find out how a specific loactfion works when it is revealed or encountered or whatever. So our first games takes 3 houres and we were a little bit confused in some situations.
The Gameplay
The game is a deckbuilding, exploration, fantasy, levelup, race, adventure game with modular board and victory (fame) point system and tactic cards. You can see it is very unique but also it uses many well known game mechanics.
The deckbuilding aspect: Each character has its own startdeck of action cards. With these cards you can move, fight and interact with location during your turn. There are many ways to improve and expand the own deck: By leveling up the character, by interacting with location, as loot for a fight against one of the many monsters and so on. There are also differment types of action cards including spells, artifacts and advanced action cards. Also you can get a number (specified by you character level) of allie cards which can help you in many ways. The hand cards are also your LP. If you are wounded by a monster or another player you have to draw as many wound cards as you were hit. The wound cards count against your handlimit and so, each time you got a wound, the number of usefull cards in your hand is lowered. To discard some of the wound cards from your hand you have to heal you as an action from one of your action cards, an ability from your skill tokens or from one of your allies. The deckbuilding mechanism fits very well and works perfectly with the other aspects of the game.
The exploration aspect: To explore the world you can go on a space without an adjecent map tile next to it. By spending movement points you can reveal the next map tile from a tile stack and place it next to your own location. In this way the accessable world expands during the game and more and more locations and monsters become available. In most scenarios you have to find and conquer a city, so you have to explore the world to finish the game. You also want to find new locations to improve your character in different ways and use the advantages of villages, citys or mage towers (and more). But there are no quests in this game and so you stumble through the world without any other motivations as the described ones. And this is for me a little flaw in the game. It is not really a big problem but it feels not right for a big, mighty mage to travel through the world only to look if there is something needful anywhere. 349