Mistfall

Mistfall

Now With Players!

Okay, so I didn’t completely miss out on any and all gaming last night. We finally had a couple goes at multiplayer Mistfall.

I really like it. Game really opens up.

Thinking through the party based on nothing but the quest card and narrative is fun by itself. Do we bring a holy character? Do we bring magic? Will it be useful to be sneaky or what? 

There are seven characters in the box so there are a lot of possible configurations. I think that’s where a lot of the replayability is (along with the randomized map, encounters and critter draws). We played two three-player games last night: first had the big tank, a cleric and the frost wizard; second had the whirlwind-fast super-axe woman, the sneaky rogue and again the cleric.

One thing you don’t really see in solo play is how surprisingly interactive the game is. Lots of people are complaining on the Geek about the lack of interaction, and they’re 100% wrong. They think that if you can’t gang up to fight monsters then there’s no interaction, but that’s so wrongheaded that I think they’re looking for reasons to complain. 

I really like that we can learn the characters well, not only so we can put them to good use but also so we know what’s possible at the table in other people’s hands. If I know the Cleric’s various healing and buff tricks, then yay, we can plan around that. That’s neat. Very much more in-depth than the Pathfinder ACG.

Not surprisingly, there’s a downward difficulty slope as the game goes on (up until you reach the BigBad at the end). I don’t know that it’s a deal breaker but we certainly felt it both times in the training scenario: First fight is iffy, second fight is a cakewalk, third fight is optimizing our rewards, then the final showdown is back to being tricky.

I’m normally a co-op hater but this one seems to work pretty well. I think it’s because each character has so damned much to track. I also like that each location’s encounter isn’t (necessarily) just a straight beatdown: you have to think through various ways to complete them, which comes down to shuffling enemies around amongst the characters, leveraging your “reflex” cards (play literally any time effects, with lots of hidden combo implications worth exploring as you play), lots of procedural problem-solving. 

I have no idea how long it’ll be fun to play. Probably until everyone’s mastered all seven characters and can suss out their synergies before playing through a whole quest. That’s going to be a goodly amount of play I think!