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Description from the publisher:
Villainous rats have allied with vicious hunting birds to pillage the humble mouse settlement across Meanderfield. But look! Brave mice, mounted on starlings and blue jays, swoop in to wage war against this evil alliance! The Downwood Militia soars into action against the Vermin Raiders!
Plaid Hat Games proudly presents Tail Feathers, the exciting new miniature skirmish game by our very own Jerry Hawthorne set in the beloved world of Mice and Mystics. Soar across the table, send your troops on dangerous missions, lock beaks with opposing birds, and defend your nest!
Featuring the beautiful hand-sculpted miniatures by Chad Hoverter Mice and Mystics fans have come to love, Tail Feathers raises the stakes with 13 dutiful ground troops, 5 headstrong birds that tilt for launching and turning, plus 5 daring pilots. Players will recreate the famous battles for aerial supremacy that shaped the Mice and Mystics world.
Outwit and outfly your opponent in stand-alone scenarios, or play a full campaign and see your units gain skill from one battle to the next.
Tail Feathers is a stand-alone game, not a Mice and Mystics expansion, but you can use your Mice and Mystics: Sorrow and Remembrance miniatures in Tail Feathers right out of the box.
Tail Feathers offers cinematic gameplay and a fresh, whimsical setting for tabletop skirmish gaming. Players must balance the use of both flying and ground units to achieve victory. Here are some highlights:
Compatibility! If you already own Mice and Mystics, you’re in luck! Tail Feathers includes cards which allow you to use your Mice and Mystics figures in Tail Feathers! Bam!
Story driven campaign! Tail Feathers includes a scenario book with story rich scenarios all designed to be played either as both stand-alone experiences or linked together as a campaign.
Unique and challenging flight system! Tail Feathers includes 5 beautiful bird miniatures that are mounted on a special flight stand that allows the birds to ’tilt’. This tilting is a mechanism used to determine your flight direction, but the skill of effectively maneuvering your birds is up to you!
Everything you need! No empty box here. Tail Feathers comes with enough content for two players to field fully-realized, battle-ready forces, as well as cards that allow you to utilize your Mice and Mystics: Sorrow and Remembrance figures as Tail Feathers ground troops right away.
Tail Feathers expands the Mice and Mystics universe, introducing fans new and old to the battles on birds that secured peace and safety for the Downwood Forest. Tail Feathers’ innovative game system will provide hours of fun and excitement in the world of Mice and Mystics.
Ages | 9+ |
---|---|
Players | 2 Players, 3 Players, 4 Players |
Play Time | 60m – 90m |
Designer | Jerry Hawthorne |
Mechanics | Action Queue, Dice Rolling |
Theme | Animals, Aviation / Flight, Miniatures, Wargame, Fantasy |
Publisher | Crowd Games, Raven Distribution, Galápagos Jogos, Heidelberger Spieleverlag, Plaid Hat Games |
Chignecto
Well designed miniatures, but the gameplay doesn't quite come together to be as satisfying as it should.
DuneTiger
This is a tentative 7 based on the first scenario. Like all campaign games, I'm sure it will shine if played through the campaign, so the below is more about the system itself. First off, let's get the elephant addressed - the sculpts are god damned beautiful. There is a wonderful world presented to you through the minis alone and thankfully, the accompanying prose in the scenario booklet isn't fan-fic crap and instead decently-written fantasy fluff. I like it a lot. But even without the prose, if you just set the game up, it promises a story, and that's pretty amazing considering other mini-centric games. You immediately know that there is something about to go down on the table and that rodents are riding birds and brooding in trees, waiting for it to start. It's quite a sight to behold. So the system, then, is a little less... er... elegant in comparison. At a high level, it does its job rather well, though perhaps not necessarily intuitively (but hey, I play wargames, so intuitive play isn't a requirement). I like the idea that ground forces are abstracted, giving the idea that the flight-fights are taking place way up by the canopy and anyone sent out on a mission is way down below, out of sight. I also don't like this idea because you have just so many of them and surely there would be tangles down on the ground, but that's nitpicking. At any rate, the reason you come to this game is the aerial combat, right? That's what people are immediately going to see, and we envision swooping and zipping and feathers flying everywhere! Instead, what you get is a functional, yet not-quite-evocative system based on chucking dice around, which is to be expected. As a combat system goes, it works. You basically crash into each other, throw dice, work out your hits and defense, and on you go. A neat touch is throwing feather tokens around after each wound, but at the same time, the way the rules are laid out means that these feathers aren't going to stick around for long; what they do is rattle your pilots, which in the grand scheme of things means little. Given that we're chucking dice around, the one or two extra dice your non-rattled pilot gives you won't make too much of a difference. Perhaps what I'm getting at is that in a game about aerial combat, it just didn't seem to flow correctly. Crashing into another bird locks them together and displaces them; that feeling of momentum so wonderfully represented by the flight-path system (think X-Wing or Attack Wing) is insta-gone as birds stop and reposition mid-flight to peck at each other. It seemed weird. So long as you cross a branch, you can immediately stop and land on it. Like I said above, it all works from a gameplay perspective and adds to your strategic choices (which is why despite my griping, I've given this game a pretty good score), but from an aesthetic perspective, wouldn't a game about non-hovering birds (these ain't colibri) be more about managing your velocity, altitude, etc? Maybe I just expect too much. I also didn't like (at least in the first scenario) that the entire point was to kill your opponent's nest when the game's main attraction is aerial combat. Despite all of that, I liked the game a lot. It's wonderfully whimsical, but has a nice dark edge to its story that gives weight to what you're doing on the table. I never played Mice and Mystics (we're getting to it), but this is a wonderful world that I would like to visit more often. As a kid, the Secret of NIMH was one of my favorite movies and this game just speaks to that inner child of mine.
Deliriumz
Like this game a lot. birds are awesome and the whole areal combat and feathers etc is really cool. Rules take a bit to get head around for new players but once played few games its all good.