Mystic Vale
A curse has been placed on the Valley of Life. Hearing the spirits of nature cry out for aid, clans of druids have arrived, determined to use their blessings to heal the land and rescue the spirits.
45m
2 - 4 Players
Ages 14+
A curse has been placed on the Valley of Life. Hearing the spirits of nature cry out for aid, clans of druids have arrived, determined to use their blessings to heal the land and rescue the spirits.
adebisi
Mystic Vale is the natural evolutionary step in the line of deck building games. Instead of adding new cards to your deck, you actually add new powers to your cards. This has been made possible with transparent cards that are stacked on top of each other and sleeved to keep them together. Another alternative could have been to adopt the legacy concept but that would have limited the replay value of the game. There is a clear narrative to the game. The first half of the game is spent on acquiring purchase powers while the latter half concentrates more on buying victory points, and it is up to the players to decide when to make this strategic shift. I quite enjoy playing Mystic Vale. Decisions you make feel satisfying and there is some room for chance and pushing your luck. The game is light enough for casual gaming but not too light to be totally meaningless. Iconography is a little ambiguous at times but not too bad. Art follows along the lines of classic fantasy seen a number of times already. Putting the game back into the box can be a bit annoying though, because you have to unsleeve all the cards.
annemariemcd
Game had to end as a guest needed to leave suddenly, but before that I seemed to spend a lot of time clueless. Worth trying again though to find out if I like it. ETA: still spent a lot of time clueless, and some aspects seemed to just never be available for me, but I ended up winning, and overall it was nice to play. I still need more plays to decide if I would like to play this more often or if it's not fun anymore once the learning curve is mastered.
AmandaDesignsGames
I love the card crafting, it is a really awesome system with lots of legs. While I usually dislike push-your-luck in games, I like it here, because you always know the odds, and even busting has benefits (getting one spoil card out of your next hand, and refreshing that mana token), and because of the deck-building nature, the cost vs reward is easy (and interesting) to calculate ("With 4 I can buy this, but getting to 6 would be much greater"). However, my main problem with the game (which I still like, don't get me wrong) is that the actions you get to do are pretty boring. You get resources to spend, free discards, anti-spoils. The Guardians can get interesting and open room for strategy, but compare that with the non-plus cards from Dominion, and you'll yawn.