Upon opening the story book and beginning to read aloud the two-page prologue, I immediately knew that there was something strange afoot with Mice And Mystics. It wasn’t that the writing was particularly bad or the setting and theme particularly trite — nothing so plainly damning as that. Very simply, it was just the length of the dang thing. By the end of my recitation my throat was sore and I didn’t feel like playing a game anymore. The pacing of the game had been thrown off before the first turn was even taken. And then it hit me: I still had to read the chapter introduction.
Mice And Mystics envisions itself as a hybrid of sorts between children’s storybook and co-op dungeon crawl. Cool! Problem is, the game inherits the absolute worst of both worlds: a simplistic narrative that no well-adjusted adult could possibly care about and some mucky rules overhead guaranteed to stymie the vast majority of children that come in contact with it. It is clear that Mice And Mystics wants to be a bridge between young and old, to speak to kids of all ages, to bring families together and give them a grand adventure to experience. But instead, it is a game with no discernible audience and a heap-load of design flaws.
In Mice And Mystics, players take the roles of a prince and his cohort who are magically transformed into mice as they plan a counterattack against the evil queen and her minions who have overtaken their castle. It is a fully co-operative dungeon crawl with dozens of combat scenarios spread across its ten chapters. The production and components are top-notch, and for what the art lacks in imagination it makes up for in sheer professionalism. There is not a weak or out-of-place illustration anywhere to be seen. The game’s dedication to its theme is also laudable, as it offers many clever combat and traversal options such as silverware catapults, fishing wire grappling hooks, the ability for certain mice to equip single-handed weapons in their tail, etc. In practice none of this is very fun, but hey I respect the effort!
I’m already out of positive things to say, so let’s get right into it. The reason Mice And Mystics falls so completely flat is that it continually reduces complexity in all the wrong places while refusing to simplify in any of the areas that would make it a viably fun dungeon crawl-lite. You’d think the design focus for a family game in this genre would be aimed at pruning areas like stat-tracking, equipment/inventory management, skill trees, enemy actions, initiative order, etc. And, to be fair, Mice And Mystics ain’t Gloomhaven or Descent when it comes to that stuff, but the design still for whatever reason preserves the bulk of structural complexities of standard dungeon crawl systems. The design even introduces a few new complexities of its own through its baffling tendency to tie dice rolls into nearly every action in the game. Dice are rolled to move, attack, defend, search, determine success for context-specific actions, enemy actions, you name it. They even function as the game timer. It’s way too much. The designer seems to have thought that tying every possible system to the dice roll would smooth out the game’s turn-by-turn cadence and be a major asset in bridging the gap between family game and hobby game when in reality it produces the exact opposite effect. There is simply no reason for a player’s move value to be X + numberRolled. A few dozen more rules like that, and what happens? A game experience that is mostly made up of figuring out how many dice you are supposed to roll for any given action, then trying to decipher what your roll means. Of course, this is in addition to the same old stat-and-modifier tracking monotony, surplus of card text to parse, and admin-heavy creature behavior and turn order tracking — in other words, a complete failure to streamline the dungeon crawl experience in any way.
So where the hell does the game simplify? The difficulty, brother! By making it easy. By making it require no strategy or tactics whatsoever to progress. Essentially, a game of Mice And Mystics boils down to 1) move your mouse to the nearest monster then 2) hit it with your adorably tiny weapon. Then, once all the enemies in the room are dead (and ONLY then!), are you permitted to progress to the next room and do it all over again. There aren’t just the standard chapter-specific enemy encounters to slog through, either. Remember those infernal dice I mentioned earlier? Well, they can also trigger random enemy “surges” that give you an additional pile of enemies to fight (and yes, you have to clear them out too before you can progress to the next room). Frankly put, I was bored to death of the core system before the first chapter was over. I never even bothered playing the second (although I did play through the first chapter separately with two different groups, both to gauge player reactions and to give the game a second chance as I felt I had perhaps written it off too quickly). I’m certain that the subsequent chapters add all sorts of twists to the core mechanics; I am equally certain that none of them are fun. When you have aggressively tied every facet of your system to the monotony of the dice roll, there is only so much room for improvement.
“Okay, now during this part of the chapter, a crow is going to be circling above you and dive bombing you as you scurry across the garden!”
“Cool! How does it work?”
“The same way as everything else! You roll some dice and if you roll a certain something or other, he gets ya!”
Perhaps this wouldn’t all be so painfully clear if the excellent Legends Of Andor hadn’t come out the same year. And while Legends Of Andor has faults of its own (nearly every game does), it is the polar opposite of Mice And Mystics when it comes to its approach at simplifying the co-operative dungeon crawl genre (to the point of where it is debatably not even a dungeon crawl anymore, or at the very least greatly stretches the limits of the term). I’ll save that praise for a separate review, but let it be known: for essentially every single grievance I’ve aired above, Legends Of Andor has a creative solution that successfully works for reducing rules overhead while maintaining an impressive level of depth and challenge.
But back to Mice And Mystics. What else is there to say? There’s no need to explicate its issues any further. The game reviewed rather well overall, and, conceptually at least, I totally see why. A co-op dungeon crawl that you can play with your family certainly sounds great on paper! For me though, there is no angle from which I can view Mice And Mystics that makes it appear to have delivered on that ambition successfully. It isn’t a streamlined experience at all — merely watered down — and lacks in every area that makes board games memorable: unique social interactions, player agency, flexible possibility spaces, etc. Then again, if exorbitant amounts of expository text is your thing, Mice And Mystics has you covered.
Mice And Mystics gets a rating of TWO out of FIVE, indicating it is NOT RECOMMENDED.