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Impressions of the latest prototype can be found here:

http://opinionatedgamers.com/2011/05/10/tom-rosen-czech-it-out/

Mage Knight is designed by Vlaada Chvatil and will be published by WizKids, likely at Essen 2011. I gather the title will be familiar to some of you because the source material is based on a pre-existing licensed property, but I am unfamiliar with any prior Mage Knight universe. Mage Knight is an adventure game along the lines of Runebound or Chvatil’s earlier Prophecy. It is a game for people who are not adverse to a high degree of complexity, a fairly long playing time, and rolling dice. It’s also a game for people who can get into the theme of exploring terrain with your hero and fighting monsters. Mage Knight is a scenario-driven game that will allow players to work through a number of different scenarios with slightly different rules or goals for each. I believe the game is for 2 to 4 players; I tested it with just 2 players which I thought worked rather well.

As you can see from the photo on the right, there is a lot going on in Mage Knight. It is a board game with an expanding board as you move your figure around to explore new terrain. But it is also a card game where players will have a deck and hand of cards that control play. In fact – I hesitate to call it this because it might give the wrong impression – it’s a bit of a deck-building game. However, it’s much further from the Dominion-Thunderstone-Ascension-Nightfall line of games than has become the norm in the last couple years.

Mage Knight is played over the course of a given number of day and night rounds. Players are trying to earn the most fame by the end of the game by doing heroic deeds like slaying monsters. Players each start the game with a deck of around 25 cards or so. It is a larger starting deck than is normal for a deck-building game. There is also a lot less shuffling. Each player has a unique hero that has a slightly different starting deck and somewhat different abilities. You draw five cards into your hand and play as many cards as you want on your turn to do things like move around on the map, fight monsters, and recruit mercenaries. After your turn you draw back up to five cards.

The round ends after any one player’s deck runs out and everyone else gets one final turn. This is clever because it allows you to decide whether to burn through your deck quickly or to proceed more deliberately. This works because cards give you a certain action listed on them, like 4 movement points or 2 attack points. However, you can use any card as a wild worth 1 point of any action. This simple rule makes for interesting decisions about whether to conserve your cards and use them more effectively for their listed action, or to rush through your cards to do exactly what you want to do but less efficiently. This will also depend in great part on what your fellow players do, which could devolve into a bit of a group think issue, so you may want to mix up your opponents to see different approaches.

So as I was saying, on your turn you play as many cards as you want to move around and fight monsters. As you can see in the photo on the right, the map is made up of different terrain as you might expect, which can hinder your movement plans. The destinations are things like towns, monasteries, caves, towers, and the like. In the towns you can find mercenaries that you can recruit to join you on your roaming quest. In most of the other locations you can find monsters to fight, which will earn you fame, which is the whole point after all. One nice mechanic is that fame is not simply an abstract point track, but also indicates when you “level up” during the game by reaching certain fame thresholds, which gives you new special abilities or cards. The combat system for fighting monsters is fairly straightforward. First you get to attack with any ranged attacks that you have, then the monster attacks you if it’s still alive, and finally you get to attack with melee attacks. When you take damage it is in the form of useless wound cards that go into your deck; no surprise there. I gather you can also fight your fellow players although I didn’t see that happen in my game so I’m not certain of how it works. I believe it allows you to push them away on the map and put their figure in an annoying location.

I said it was like a deck-building game; you might be wondering what I meant. Basically, you can acquire new spells or artifacts in towns or various other locations that go into your deck. These actually go on top of your deck for you to use next turn. The reason it doesn’t feel like a traditional (can that adjective be used to describe such a new genre?) deck-builder is that you shuffle your deck only a few times and you only add a handful of cards to your deck over the course of the game. You’re not getting a ton of cards or shuffling constantly. You only shuffle after each day or night round, which is probably only a handful of times in the whole couple hours, depending on the scenario.

There is one last interesting mechanic that I should mention which is mana. At the beginning of the round, players roll a common pool of mana dice that show various colors. Each turn, players can take one mana die and use its color to boost one of their cards played. Most (maybe all, I can’t recall) cards have a normal effect and a super effect if boosted with a particular mana color. After your turn you re-roll the die you used and add it back into the mana pool. There is one side of the die that is useless and essentially removes the die from the pool for the rest of that round. Some cards also allow you to “crystalize” mana which gives you a gem of that color and lets you save the mana for use on a later turn.

So that is Mage Knight in a very cursory nutshell. It is probably the most intricate game discussed here so it is the one game that I feel I really can’t do justice to in a quick overview. I thought it showed a lot of potential, but was also clearly a work in progress. There was so much going on that it was impossible to entirely wrap my head around in this initial play. I have a feeling that fans of adventure games will enjoy this one, and another feeling that this will help cement Vlaada’s reputation as one of the most, if not the most, versatile designer(s). If nothing else, Mage Knight is absolutely nothing like Dungeon Petz above or the two games discussed below.