by Greg Forster
I love, love, love M&M. My firmly held belief is that every human being ought to purchase a copy and make Jerry and Plaid Hat ridiculously rich. To avoid ethical dilemmas, Bill Gates clearly ought to purchase copies for anyone who is going to have trouble paying the rent if they buy their own copy. (It'd do a lot more good for humanity than the billions he's now wasting on faddish education gimmickry.)That having been said...
My daughter and I burned through ch. 5-10 over the weekend and I have a few complaints to register. I register them primarily in hope of contributing to higher quality in future Plaid Hat products.
1) Over and over, we are given story text we are supposed to read when we accomplish a final milestone (defeat the crow, find the Mystic Tome, etc.) and the text is written as though the chapter is now over. But in each case the story was not in fact over for us because we still had to defeat some minions. While not a terrible flaw, it definitely detracted from our "user experience." In the case of ch. 6 it even left us wondering if we were playing properly (as the question I posed here on BGG attests). This could have been very, very easily avoided by telling us to read the story text at the end of the chapter rather than when accomplishing the milestone.
2) Chapter 8 is poorly designed throughout. We are basically told up front "DON'T GO THROUGH THE GUARD ROOM!" This removes what could have been a meaningful player choice - something that this game already needs more of. Adding insult to injury, we are also told "WHEN YOU GET TO CHOOSE A SCROLL IN THE LIBRARY, CHOOSE LEVITATE!" This is even worse because while the mice might have figured out "hey, the guard room will probably be, you know, guarded" they wouldn't have had that detailed a level of advanced knowledge unless they were making a specific plan to go through the sewer pipe, in which case why not just tell us that? And THEN, we find out that there's a special search in a subsequent room for the Levitate scroll - one that doesn't give us the option of finding any other scroll, so it's wasted because we were basically ordered to find the Levitate scroll already. AND THEN we find out that if we were smart enough not to go toward the guard room, WE DON'T NEED THE LEVITATE SCROLL. After that kind of frustration, it hardly seems worth pointing out that while we're told we can find any party item of our choice in the first tunnel tile we enter, with pictures of all four tunnel tiles displayed to make the point, in fact you have no choice but to enter the Crystal Tunnels first. No other legal moves are possible.
3) The rules for ch. 9 should specify what happens to Vurst Ally if he accumulates three wounds. This is likely to happen because the players have all kinds of incentive to separate Vurst from the party and lure the minions towards him. At first I assumed he would switch back to evil (Reminds me of the old Simpsons Halloween episode: "Here's your problem, somebody set this thing to Evil!"). But I couldn't find that in the rules. We finally figured out that Vurst is probably captured like a mouse, returning to the board when all minions are cleared. We had Vurst defeated in the Queen's Chambers before Vanestra arrived, so there would have been no opportunity for him to be rescued - but of course the scenario says to place him next to Vanestra when she appears so that presumably overrides his capture.
This is such an awesome game, but there are just so many things in both the rules and the scenario that would have been caught with more careful playtesting. In a less awesome game I think I would mind less - it's like finding a careless brush stroke in the Mona Lisa.