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.
Akado
The base game felt very...incomplete. There wasn't much going on, and it felt like the best strategy is simply getting VP from one or two big cards. Needless to say, I don't need to own it. Played with first expansion, and some combos open up that are worth using, but it still takes luck to get the cards available for slotting and buying, and the combos must come out early enough in the game to be more valuable than simple VP cards.
Andy Parsons
John Clair has had the clever idea of designing a deck builder in which you not only build your deck but assemble the cards in it. Unfortunately the card components supplied are all rather bland. Play becomes a fairly tedious matter of counting your money and buying what you can afford. None of the cards that I saw in my one play did anything very interesting; there was certainly no prospect of the kinds of interaction you see in Dominion. I think that Mystic Vale's card crafting will fascinate the purist deckbuilders, but there is so little here for anyone else. I found the artwork quite pleasing, although the abundance of small font text was less so. The cards and acetates seem well made.
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.