Week 12 - Boardgames

I chose Mice And Mystics as the game I will analyze this week. It is a story-based RPG board game centered around a few adventurous mice. The game is split up into chapters, each with its own unique map configuration, available mice, enemies, and win condition. To start, players choose the mouse they will play as and place the chapter's enemies on the board.

With many moving parts, the player can become easily overwhelmed; however, Mice and Mystics trys to mitigate this with consistent language throughout the game. Health, attack, defense, and many other statistics are all represented with unique symbols that are consistent for both the player’s mice and the various enemies. As Soren Johnson points out, “The self-imposed constraint of a limited grammar keeps the designer from special cases” (11:17). This is true for Mice and Mystics. The consistent symbols for both players and enemies help to simplify the combat as much as possible. Attacks, defense, and damage are all applied the same way for enemies and player mice. 

To simplify the game further, Mice And Mystics abstracts the way in which new enemies are added to the board. When using the specially designed dice for combat, enemies have a chance to roll a cheese icon that adds cheese to the “cheese wheel” which has space for 8 cheese tokens. When the wheel is full, new enemies are added to the board. This makes the process of adding new enemies very transparent and allows for players to quickly grasp the inner game (16:25). Players quickly understand the system and can begin to strategize around it. 

The visual nature of Mice And Mystics also increases the overall transparency of the game. Very little is concealed in the game. The location of players and enemies as well as their stats and equipment are all public knowledge. Anyone can accurately judge the strength of an enemy before initiating a battle. This helps the player quickly learn how to best play the game once it has started, but before the game begins the player might struggle. Players must choose a mouse to play as during the game, and each mouse has its own unique attributes. However, without knowing much about the game, new players are forced to make an important decision without knowing all the consequences, or as Johnson puts it, “Don’t ask your players to make a bunch of crucial decisions, like drafting a complete Magic deck, before they’ve even experienced the game itself” (22:05). Without any game experience, a new player won’t know what they will want to look for in character. 

The other major shortcoming of Mice And Mystics is its overreliance on post-luck. Aside from movement, almost all of the actions a player can take involve post-luck. The combat is entirely post-luck; players initiate a battle and then roll dice to determine the damage dealt. When exiting water terrain or removing the “Webbed” condition, players must roll a dice and hope for a favorable outcome. Much of the game relies on these types of mechanics, but doing so takes agency away from the player. In this case, the most interesting choices happen before combat “when you’re choosing your build. That's when you make the decisions” (24:53). Unfortunately, this makes the combat — the main aspect of the game — somewhat tedious. 

Overall, Mice And Mystics is an interesting game with a heavy emphasis on combat and narrative. It excels at simplifying its systems with consistent grammar and abstract elements. However, It does have some flaws with regards to transparent mechanics and its reliance on post-luck systems. Despite this, I wouldn’t mind playing it if I had the chance.