The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Mage Knight is a now well-established collectable miniatures tactical game. Mage Knight Dungeons takes the same design idea and applies it to a HeroQuest-like dungeon-hacking board game. The game allows many Mage Knight miniatures to be used as monsters and adds its own figures for heroes and treasure chests.

The cost

The classical problem with collectable games is the cost of entry. Here's what you get for your money in each of the standard packs:

Starter Pack (UKP 15) Booster Pack (UKP 5) Builders Kit (UKP 10)

Heroes 2 1 -

Standard Monsters 5 2 -

Rare Monsters - 1 -

Treasure Chests 2 1 -

Standard Encounter Tokens 6 - 4

Tough Encounter Tokens - - 2

Pregenerated Maps 1 (double-sided) - -

Map Building Tiles - - 6 (double-sided)

Doors - - 4

Special Floor Tiles - - 6 (double-sided)

Now, how many of these things you actually need to play the game depends on what variant you want to play. There are two basic decisions to make: to use pregenerated maps or to build the dungeon from tiles, and to play Lone Wolf (one hero per player) or Heroic Team (multiple heroes per player). The starter box includes all you need to play 2-player Lone Wolf with pregenerated maps. To play any other variant involves buying additional items in order to meet either the natural requirements or the "minimum pool contributions" mandated by the rules.

In order to play the Dungeon Construction rules, you need 5 dungeon tiles per player - that means a Dungeon Builders Kit per player. So, an important warning: if you just want to try the game out with your group, do not buy a Builders Kit to go with your Starter Kit - you won't be able to use it.

To play Heroic Teams, each player needs 100 points of heroes, and the rules state this means four heroes. This could be gotten as four boosters (UKP20) except that the rules also require each player to contribute at least 6 Standard Encounter Tokens, meaning that each player needs to get two of their heroes from a starter kit, bringing the cost to 25UKP. And don't forget - you can't use two identical heroes, and they're random, so you might need more than four boosters to get your heroes. (Note that while it is true that the minimum requirements and uniqueness rules can be ignored or worked around, a review must necessarily examine the game as written by the game authors.)

If you want to play with more than 2 players, the costs increase appropriately, with an additional stinger: although the game can be played on prebuilt maps with more than 2 players, it tends to get awfully cramped; with 4 players, there are only 4 legal places to put treasure. And because of the design of the prebuilt maps, it is difficult to join them together (unless you like very long, thin dungeons)

The table below shows my estimated buy-in for each game variant. "Participation" is the amount you need to have to join in a game in which every other player also has at least the "participation" amount. This is also assuming that you get lucky on the random distributions and don't get duplicates of unique items, etc. "Purchase" shows the actual items required: S for a starter, B for a booster, K for a builders' kit. The [!] next to some game types indicates my unsureness about prebuilt map games with more than two players.

LONE WOLF Cost (UKP) Purchase

Participation, prebuilt maps N/A

2 players, prebuilt maps 15 S

3 players, prebuilt maps [!] 20 SB

4 players, prebuilt maps [!] 25 SBB

Participation, with building 25 SK

2 players, with building 35 SKK

3 players, with building 50 SBKKK

4 players, with building 65 SBBKKKK

HERO TEAMS Cost (UKP) Purchase

Participation, prebuilt maps 25 SBB

2 players, prebuilt maps 50 SSBBBB

3 players, prebuilt maps [!] 75 SSSBBBBBB

4 players, prebuilt maps [!] 100 SSSSBBBBBBBB

Participation, with building 35 SBBK

2 players, with building 70 SSBBBBKK

3 players, with building 105 SSSBBBBBBKKK

4 players, with building 140 SSSSBBBBBBBBKKKK

What you get

So, what are these actual bits like? Well, the heroes and monsters are supplied as pre-painted plastic miniatures with dials in the bases. The dials show several sets of game statistics for the miniature, and the base has a window allowing one set to show through; when a figure takes damage or levels up, you rotate the dial allowing the new set of stats to show. Special abilities are shown on the stats dials by the colouration and background of the stat value; a reference card relates colours to rules for abilities. Each player and monster also has a points value, used in building teams and monster placement.

The painting on the miniatures is decidedly variable; it's fairly simple, and in some cases overly so but in some cases quite effective. Whether you'll appreciate it or not is really down to how much of a painting fiend you are; a friend who enthusiastically paints huge Warhammer armies commented that he wished they'd been supplied unpainted, but I myself, as one who would probably just play them unpainted if they came that way, am quite glad for it.

The dials, on the other hand, present a problem. If you're used to the standard "base only!" handling of miniatures, how exactly do you turn a dial on the base of a miniature? Answer, hold the miniature and turn the base. The problem is that this tends to put torsion on the legs of the miniature, and some of them do not look like they'll take kindly to that. On the Werecat, for example, it's practically impossible to turn the dial by that method without snapping the entire miniature off its own legs, reducing the player to the decidedly undignified alternative: digging a finger into the viewing window and dragging it around the dial manually. Further, looking at the values on a dial can be problematic if the figure in question is in the middle of heated melee: it involves a fair amount of leaning over the table and squinting.

Unfortunately, the difficulties with the dials and the continuous need to look up abilities on the reference cards make early games slow down seriously, negating the big benefit of the stat dial system in the first place. However, I suspect that these - or at least the latter - will begin to fade after a few games.

The maps are large and glossy-printed, although they do suffer a little from being folded up; they all represent dungeons that could be built with the tiles from the Dungeon Builders' Kit. The tiles are preferable as a playing surface, as they are firm and flat. The art on the tiles is unspectacular but functional.

The Treasure Chests aren't anything special to look at; but, they can be opened and, like the main miniatures, they have internal dials. One dial's viewing window is in the lid of the chest, and the second is in the face exposed when the lid is lifted; the idea is that the first one represents the trap on the chest, and the second one represents the treasure. These dials are easy to turn, although they do have an awkward tendancy to get stuck between positions.

One distinct grumble is the packaging. Although it's nice and convenient for the retailer, it's hard to unpack and provides nothing in the way of storage. Even the card components are held in bags that must be cut or torn open rather than ziploc type bags as used by some board games. This means that everything has to be stored somehow; this is less awkward than for some games (because of the stats being integrated with the miniatures) but still annoying.

How it plays

The basic play mechanic is quite simple. The dungeon is first built, either by choosing a map or by taking it in turns to play tiles while preserving contiguity, and then players place treasures and random encounter tokens. Random encounter tokens are Space Hulk-style "blips"; they represent the location of random numbers of monsters. They also come in two difficulty levels (or three if you want a big challenge), but although the ratio of encounter levels is controlled, you cannot see the difficulty of an encounter from the token.

In the actual game, you have some number of "activations" per turn - precisely how many depends on the variant you're playing and the number of heroes you have. An activation is used to move either your hero, a monster, or a random encounter token; each can only be moved once a round, and there are rules in place to prevent players from activating monsters they're fighting to make them run away, or leading easy-to-kill monsters to themselves.

Each player, and monster, has five stats: Speed, Attack, Defence, Damage, and Range. When you activate a figure, you get movement points equal to its Speed; if you activate a wandering monster token, you get 4 movement points. Moving around costs 1 point per square, or 2 for diagonal moves, unless there's a number written on the square in which case that's how many points it costs. Turning around is free.

There are only two things you can do apart from moving: getting treasure and fighting. Treasure gathering can only be done by Heroes, and is done in stages. First, as soon as you move next to a treasure chest, you can see what trap it has, which is determined by rolling a d6 and turning the dial on the chest's lid that number of spaces. Of these spaces, only one of them will be "no trap", which may seem a little excessive; however, you then get a chance to disarm the trap, which costs 3 movement points and is done by rolling 2d6 and beating a number specified on the dial. If you wish, an additional 3 movement points gets you 2 to the roll, but none of the statistics helps in this roll. There is no option to simply open the chest straight away and just tough out the trap.

Once the trap is dealt with, it costs 2 points to get the chest open. The inner dial shows what treasure the chest contains; since these dials are invisible while the chest is closed, they are randomised simply by spinning them randomly when they are placed at the start of the game. The chest will either contain treasure or a second trap (which is a double whammy - not only does the poor sap have to go through the trap process again with no chance to disarm, but the chest is removed afterwards meaning the journey there was wasted). If it's treasure, the player gets to take the chest; it will score some number of points (Gold value) at the end of the game. Each treasure may or may not also give bonuses to Speed, Attack, or Defense, or add special abilities; treasures can be freely moved between your heroes to distribute bonuses, although two items of the same type can't be used by the same hero, and some items (Potions) are one-shot.

Unfortunately, if a trap goes off, there are only two possible things it can do: make a standard attack of some kind or send in extra monsters. There are no creative curses or anything like that. Likewise, the treasure can only provide bonuses to stats and add standard special abilities. The massive variety that was the hallmark of collectable card games is rather lacking here, which may disappoint some players.

Whenever a hero gets too near a wandering monster token ("getting too near" meaning being on the same tile or being adjacent to them at a tile edge), the token is flipped and the player rolls 2d6 on the table on the back of it. The table gives the total points value of monsters the opponent may place, and the number of monsters they may use to make up that total. Other than that the opponent gets a free choice from the pool of monster miniatures, which is seeded from the minimum contributions made by each player.

Taking a swing at a monster (or another Hero) uses 4 action points, and the combat is resolved simply: your attack stat 2d6 vs. the enemy's defense score. Success results in the enemy's stat dial being reduced by a number of clicks equal to your Damage stat. Your enemy then gets to hit you back, but only after the stat adjustments have been applied. If you happen to have a Range stat, you can make ranged attacks, which work in a similar way except they're at a distance and they only do one point of damage. Your opponent does still get to attack back, but only if they have a range stat that allows them to do so.

Dropping monsters, disarming traps, and gaining treasure earns you experience, and you can level up a hero every 50 points. (Disarming a trap actually gives you 50 experience points and thus is an instant level; this is rather odd, but works.) Experience is earned by the player, not the hero, so you can combine the slaying efforts of several heroes in levelling up just one. Unfortunately, there is no neat way of tracking experience points, so you just have to resort to the good old pen and paper: there's nothing wrong with that, but it seems a bit discongrous in a game that goes to such lengths to keep all the stat records in-place on the miniatures. Levelling up a hero gives them a new set of improved stats (and, possibly, new abilities). The stats for your Hero at the five possible levels are at the top end of the dial, so levelling a hero also effectively heals them, and one point of damage to a level 2 hero gives them the stats of a level 1 hero and so on.

Beyond that, there are some special rules for features on the floor (like teleports and similar), and the special abilities. There are a wide range of these, and they include things like rolling d6 for damage instead of taking the Hero's stat, making melee attacks at a short range, or defense bonuses in certain circumstances. Some "abilities" are actually disadvantages and only kick in at low values on the dial; for example, most Heroes are demoralized and forced to flee when their stats get too low; but others go berserk and start gaining combat bonuses at the lower levels.

Comments and observations

So, how does it actually play? Let's look at the Lone Wolf variant first. It's quite good fun, fast-paced, and easy to understand. It's also appealingly close to all the retro dungeon-hacking games. However, there's a stinger: it's extremely deadly, maybe even more so than many of the older dungeon-hack sims.

Why so? Well, it's the result of two things. Firstly, in most games where damage causes your statistics to rot, it only does so at a relatively slow rate. In MKD it's immediate - even one point of damage on a first level hero will start the rot, and the first hit your hero takes from a monster may well do more than one point of damage. Secondly, unless your hero has some sort of special ability that lets them heal (and they don't lose it as soon as they take any damage, which some heroes do, usually accompanied by a cry of "doh" from the player and the sound of a head smashing into a gaming table), the only way to heal is to level up; this will almost always involve getting into combat, where the stat loss will raise the chances of more damage being taken. The result is a death spiral, where every point of damage makes the next point more likely.

Fleeing monsters to escape the death spiral simply doesn't help, as without levelling you are stuck with the same low stats, so you'll only be postponing the risks. That is, if you can flee - this may also be difficult since your Speed is reduced by the combat. And if you have magical healing, using it on yourself usually involves remaining stationary for a turn, giving the monsters a golden chance to catch up.

Also, the need to level makes some of the bad special "abilities" crippling. If your sole hero is demoralized, there is pretty much you can do - you're basically dead on the spot as even a mad dash for the dungeon exit is likely to fail when you're only moving a maximum of 4 squares a turn. Berserkers do almost as badly, as they can't obtain treasure (the safest way to level) while berserk, and the combat bonus they get for berserking doesn't help when their attack stat is likely to be reduced so heavily by that point.

The Heroic Team variant is considerably better in this regard. The death spiral is almost completely eliminated, and the game becomes far more interesting as the combinations of hero abilities become evident. This form is so much better than I am convinced that this is the actual way the game is intended to be played and the Lone Wolf variant is just an add-on to enable them to sell the starter packs as stand-alone playable games.

However, there are a few problems which appear in both variants, many of which are the result of the rules on the way monsters are moved by players. These are actually worse in Heroic Team than Lone Wolf because of the number of activations given to the players in each.

The rules give Mage Knight Dungeons both the kingmaker and drag down problems. The kingmaker problem is that when a player's heroes die, they gain extra ability to move monsters as they now have spare activations. The idea is presumably to keep the player involved in the game. The problem is that sooner or later a player may simply decide that their heroes are in too bad a shape to continue, and will abandon their stake in the game in favour of smashing people with the monsters. Since they cannot ever win by doing this, they will tend to pursue an out-of-game agenda, and the most common one is simply revenge: sic the monsters on whoever moved monsters to attack them earlier. Since the other players know this, they tend to be reluctant to make the monsters attack while they do have a stake in the game.

The drag down problem is that another player's bad play or bad luck can impact on everyone. If one player gets unlucky, meets a harsh bunch of monsters, and has heroes killed by them, then the rest of the table loses out: there are now a bunch of harsh monsters on the board, a player with free activations to control them, and less heroes to battle them with. The same rule makes the monsters worse when a player leaves the dungeon, but I can see some good reasons for this: most notably, it discourages players from waiting for someone else to exit (so that their gold score is fixed) then playing on and leaving as soon as they have exceeded that amount (and if they get killed, so what, they wouldn't have won without beating that gold amount anyway). But I don't like it in the case where a player dies.

And this has some bizarre effects on the game. Let me give you an example. In one of our Heroic Team games, a player had a really bad day - almost as soon as his team entered the dungeon, they were ambushed by a Manticore, which is quite a tough monster. In desperation he activated an artifact (from the expansion set - more later), but he got unlucky and the artifact sent in 100 points MORE monsters: two Minotaur Mages (which are very bad news indeed). As the team quivered surrounded by the mighty monsters... suddenly something very strange happened. The Minotaur Mages, uh, got bored and went elsewhere. The Manticore suddenly stopped attacking so viciously. The Minotaur Mages went to the next chamber and mysteriously stood stock-still, not using any of their magical abilities, as another team pounded them to death and a member of the original team repeatedly shot one of them in the back until they went down.

Why did this happen? Well, after the Minotaur Mages appeared, the player of the original team pointed out that if the Manticore and Mages killed his party, he would start using all his activations to sic the Manticore and the Mages on the player who originally selected them from the monster pool. So, that player actually moved them away to attack another player. But after that point, nobody wanted to activate the Minotaur Mages anymore, because they knew that if they killed any heroes with them they would effectively be giving an opponent a free activation to sic the same Minotaur Mage on their heroes in revenge. So the poor Mages just stood there, inactive, counter-attacking but never using abilities, until they fell.

Later in the same game several players started wasting activations moving heroes around aimlessly or moving wandering monster tokens in unexplored areas because they "didn't want to annoy anyone". This is really not a good thing, and I have yet to put my finger on exactly what caused it to happen to so great a degree, but the fact that attacking people with monsters rarely (if ever) helps you win is probably a fairly big factor. The only real potential benefit is getting the monsters out of the way of "your" treasure and blocking other people from getting to it - can all be undone in multiplayer by another player controlling the monsters you're using ("hey, he's going to get that! Somebody move a monster over!"). As mentioned, killing other players with monsters just gives them free activations to deploy monsters against you with - even if this isn't the most efficient use of the monsters, they could not gain anything even if they did use them efficiently, so why bother?

The rules are also unclear on some points and weak on others. For example, I mentioned before that there were rules to stop people controlling monsters they were in combat with to make them run away, or controlling monsters to bring them near their own heroes to score some easy experience points after another player has damaged them down to an easy level. The rules basically say that you can't move a monster to or from a tile with one of your Heroes on it, or to a space adjacent to one of your Herose. Unfortunately, this doesn't go far enough. It's entirely legal to kill-steal by leading the half-dead monster into the ranged attack range of one of your Heroes; it's also legal to bring a monster close enough that one of your Heroes can activate, move up to it, and whack it since the checks for valid monster movement will have already been done by that time.

For unclear rules, for example, the Magic Blast ability lets you make ranged attacks that pass through enemy figures. Normally, you can counterattack from a ranged attack. So, can a figure with a ranged attack counterattack in response to being Magic Blasted? How about a figure which itself has Magic Blast? Can a figure with Magic Blast use it to counterattack when it's hit with a regular ranged attack? In a similar fashion, in a multiplayer game a player is designated the "Monster Master". (Seems Wizkids forgot to call them "Mage Spawn" that time.) This is not a player with extra power to control monsters, but the player on whose turn the activation status of monsters resets. Unfortunately, the rules are worded such that after the first round the Monster Master token would pass around, always following the direction of play, and resetting the monsters every turn. It's obvious this isn't intended, but it's still there. Another one: a monster can take a Free Spin to face a Hero which ends its turn next to it, yet it counterattacks as soon as an attack is made even if the Hero's turn didn't end. So is the counterattack made without needing to turn to face the Hero? Nothing in the rules says it isn't, except in the case of a Sneak Attack.

Finally, there's the stinger that the treasure chests are the only way of getting gold and they're random. One player might hack through a dozen monsters to get to a chest only to have it be a trap, while another might find 1000 gold or more in their first chest. The intent is obviously that treasure chests should be risky - the problem is they're not really a risk because there is no practical option not to go for them. The upside of the risk isn't a special reward - it's the object of the game. Getting hit with a double trap early on could well cause the loss-of-game-stake problem mentioned above.

Artifacts

A word on the "artifacts" set for the game. There are two Artifacts packs and their contents are fixed. Artifacts fall into two types: dungeon dressing and actual artifacts. Dungeon dressing (posts, chairs, tables) just gets in the way and makes it hard to move around. For actual artifacts, your character gets to walk up to them, spend 4 movement points, and get a random special effect. The effects are graduated in the same way that monsters are, and unlike the monster tokens you can examine an artifact to know how harsh or otherwise its effects will be. I should point out that this graduation is the only difference between the artifacts: the box might list the Clock of Death and the Healing Goddess as different artifacts, but in practice the Clock could well heal you and the Goddess blow you away.

And, of course, this randomness is the problem. Activate that artifact, and you might permanently gain Weapon Mastery or get to resurrect a Hero. On the other hand, you might have your hero wiped out down to Demoralized, permanently lose a level, send in huge monsters, etc. These are the hardest class of artifact effects, but they are similar at lower levels. It's really not that good to see your efforts wiped out by a random token draw.

Conclusion

Oh dear. This review has come out sounding a bit more negative than I really meant it to, but that's just because I wanted to analyse the problems I found a little. I should perhaps reiterate that once people have got the hang of the rules and aren't having to re-read cards every turn and similar, Mage Knight Dungeons can be a blast to play. It's entertaining, simple, and - hey, it's a dungeon hack! The unclear rules can easily be resolved when Wizkids release errata or similar. However, the high level of randomness and the metagame difficulties due to the activation rules still bother me quite a lot, and I have a horrible feeling this could wind up leading to groups abandoning the game once the consequences have come out (especially if one person gets a reputation as being "better" and thus gets monsters sicced on them by default at the start of a game). And, of course, the cost and the insistance on collection is an awkward factor, especially since Lone Wolf play is far worse than Heroic Team play. Mage Knight Dungeons works well as beer-and-pretzels - but some people may not consider it worth the money as such. Still, it is definately worth a look - but if you can get in a game with existing players, do so before you splash out with your group.