by ShawnI
My family has been playing Mice and Mystics for a while. We played through the first campaign, Sorrow and Remembrance, and the kids liked it. I got Heart of Glorm, but we lost the first scenario three times in a row, and the kids gave it up as too hard. I have to agree, it was pretty tough. I said we could just skip it and go to the next, they didn't like that idea - after all, if this was tough, presumably the other ones would also be tough, and they didn't want to try and fight their way through if it was that hard.This Christmas, I found and got them Downwood Tales, and we've been playing through it. They've been enjoying it, mostly, since it doesn't have the same difficulty as the Heart of Glorm, and we've been able to play through things - though we've been lucky at times, and we have lost a couple scenarios the first time through.
However, something which the game has always done has started to really bug me. It was an obvious design goal to prioritize the art over game play. We've spent many times looking at the board, trying to figure out if something is a space, or if two spaces are adjacent - not easy to do if there are a bunch of figures on the board or on those space. That leads to occasional annoyance, but doesn't bother me very much.
What is bothering me is how the game is prioritizing the story over the game play. When playing through a campaign, it is typical that people will have favorite characters - "their" mouse. In the scenarios, however, the game has starting requirements that sometimes seem like they are trying to force you to play not your game, but their story. The scenario we are doing now, for example, feels less like I'm playing a game and making choices, and more like I'm a puppet in a story that the game is telling. In a roleplaying game this is called railroading.
I understand that they put a lot of effort into this story, but I'm feeling like they are ignoring the fact that some of this makes the game less fun. If nobody has been playing Collin, then suddenly needing to have him show up means that somebody doesn't get to play their favorite character. And I can't see why this is required other than their story.
I guess what is frustrating me is that I used to enjoy this game - I had a character, and the kids had their characters, and we were going along listening to a story and killing monsters. Now we're going along, and we can't have the same favorite characters sometimes, and we are still listening to a story, but sometimes our characters act as puppets to the story - which makes the game less of a game, and more of a play.