Mage Knight

[popsofctown]

Someone did a play-by-forum of this board game once, and I really liked it, and I've played it with my friends three times. It's just like, a really, really fun board game?
It's a deckbuilder in that you buy cards and add them to your deck and use them to move around the board and fight monsters and persuade people. But it differs from other deckbuilders in a meaningful way in that you don't reshuffle when you run out of cards in your deck, you have to pass the round if that happens. So then part of the strategy is how fast to go, if you hold onto your cards for the perfect situation you won't use all your cards before the round ends, but if you play all your cards all the time so you can draw more cards you'll run out of deck while the round is still going and feel silly.
The game is probably too unwieldly to play-by-forum again, aside from that not being the best way to enjoy a board game. And my human relationships are pretty scant and week as of lately, so it is hard for me to get to play this game. But I wonder if anyone on site has ever played it.

[popsofctown]

The rulebook is a -long- read which is part of the difficulty in getting a group for the game.

Though the core design is good there's a little bit of "complexity for complexity's sake" in the rules that should have been smoothed over.

A golden example is that in one of the expansion scenarios, there's a rule about rolling a die at the end of a turn to see if a monster spawns, and it says, "during night, roll the die, and if you get one of the cool colors (blue, black, or green), spawn a monster. During the day, roll the die, and if you get one of the warm colors (red, white, or gold), spawn a monster).
That could have just been one rule..
There's plenty of other things too.

[popsofctown]

So solo turns out to be worth it? I'm surprised. Do you have a recommended scenario? I haven't tried solo yet.

[popsofctown]

That's good info because I was going to assume Volkare would be more fun. I will still try both but I will try Conquest first to best understand whether I enjoy solo play period.


If someone brought Mage Knight to a scummeet that was the day after Christmas I'd probably buy the plain ticket and if no one did I'd probably skip it even if the ticket was free, I'm really wild about the game.

[popsofctown]

It CAN be played by forum but it's intense, not sure I'm up to it.