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Mythic Battles box art

Mythic Battles

Game ID: GID0222174
Game Info
Year
2012
Collection
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Description

Game description from the publisher:

Mythic Greece is in chaos: Athena and Hades are at war and have sent their greatest heroes to battle. Take on the role of these generals out of legend, leading fantastic armies and lead your troops to victory!

Mythic Battles is a game which simulates epic confrontations and battles that will take your breath away. Thanks to its innovative system – the Building Battle Board (BBB), which combines game mechanisms from miniature games, board games and card games – Mythic Battles offers you an experience the likes of which you have never seen. Recruit your army, play your cards to activate your units, roll your dice to resolve combat – reinvent your way of playing!

This box contains two complete armies to play with two or four players, an initiation campaign, as well as all that's required to play as you wish. Other armies and units will periodically be released to flesh out your campaigns.

Write your legend in the blood of the fallen!

Description

Game description from the publisher:

Mythic Greece is in chaos: Athena and Hades are at war and have sent their greatest heroes to battle. Take on the role of these generals out of legend, leading fantastic armies and lead your troops to victory!

Mythic Battles is a game which simulates epic confrontations and battles that will take your breath away. Thanks to its innovative system – the Building Battle Board (BBB), which combines game mechanisms from miniature games, board games and card games – Mythic Battles offers you an experience the likes of which you have never seen. Recruit your army, play your cards to activate your units, roll your dice to resolve combat – reinvent your way of playing!

This box contains two complete armies to play with two or four players, an initiation campaign, as well as all that's required to play as you wish. Other armies and units will periodically be released to flesh out your campaigns.

Write your legend in the blood of the fallen!

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All mentions
Browse transcript mentions, sentiments, pros/cons, mechanics, topics, quotes, and references.
Total mentions: 1
This page: 1
Sentiment: pos 1 · mix 0 · neu 0 · neg 0
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Video Kw9MD3qHA6s Board Game Critique Analysis at 20:15 sentiment: positive
video_pk 81166 · mention_pk 287774
Board Game Critique - Mythic Battles video thumbnail
Click to watch at 20:15 · YouTube ↗
Overall sentiment (raw)
Positive
Pros
  • Spectacular at the table
Cons
  • Rulebook issues necessitate community tutorials/summaries
Thematic elements
Comparison games
none
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Mechanics unknown.
Video topics + discussion points
No key topics recorded for this video.
Quotes (from this video)
  • Great games shipped with terrible rulebooks.
  • The problem isn't the design, it's the documentation.
  • When the gate is broken, it doesn't matter how amazing the garden behind it is.
  • The rulebook is supposed to be the gate that lets you into the experience.
  • This isn't getting better. We're not talking about ancient games... we're talking about high production releases from the last few years that arrived with rulebooks that simply do not work.
  • That's not a learning curve, that is a wall.
  • The rulebook tried as hard as it could to hide all the weird stuff.
  • The cruelty of it is the context. This is a re-release.
  • A reprint is supposed to be your second bite at the apple, your chance to sand down every rough edge.
  • The BGG threads at launch were just flooded with rules questions, and people were asking whether later retail copies shipped with a corrected version, which is the most damning signal a rulebook can possibly send.
  • The publisher rewrites the rulebook and releases the new version as a paid product.
  • The irony is doing some heavy lifting there. That's almost too perfect.
  • Players blame themselves first.
  • And that is the real damage of a bad rulebook. It makes people feel stupid.
  • There is a difference between density and dysfunction.
  • A good rulebook scaffolds complexity. It layers information in the order a player needs it.
  • The structure is so dense and so poorly sequenced that you consistently have to read it multiple times across multiple sessions before anything coheres.
  • Community-built rule summaries became the standard learning tool, more reliable and more frequently consulted than the rulebook the game shipped with.
  • More than a decade after release, the standard recommendation for new players is still to skip the rule book and watch a video tutorial first, which is a clear signal that the official documentation never became trustworthy enough to stand on its own.
  • That's not an FAQ, that is a corrective supplement to a deficient primary document.
  • That's what bad rule books generate, this cottage industry of third-party fixes that should never have been necessary.
  • At some point, a pattern is a policy.
  • The rule book was written for people who already know how to play.
  • A game asking players to invest significantly in both time and money should not require that players outsource explanation to volunteer fans online.
  • Simplicity is no protection.
  • Writing a clear rule book is a separate skill from designing a clear game.
  • When you've spent that much money and waited that long, opening the box to find a document that cannot explain how to play feels like a betrayal of the implicit contract between publisher and backer.
  • Complexity is not an excuse for poor structure.
  • Game designers are not naturally positioned to ask that question because they already know everything. They need editors who do not.
  • Professional technical writers exist. Rule book editors exist as a dedicated specialty within the hobby now.
  • Until publishers treat rule book production as a non-negotiable line item rather than an afterthought squeezed into the final weeks of production, we will keep having this conversation, and players will keep arriving at what should have been a great first session armed with a document that sets them up to fail.
  • Every single game we've talked about today is worth playing.
  • The rulebook failures we've documented are a reason to seek out community tutorials and third-party summaries and how to play videos before your first session. They are not a reason to avoid the games entirely.
  • The rulebook is supposed to be the gate that lets you into the experience. And when the gate is broken, it doesn't matter how amazing the garden behind it is.
  • The Conan rule books were universally panned, and that experience cost Monolith both bad press and the additional expense of rewriting and posting replacement rule books to backers.
  • That's the line that should be tattooed on every studio's wall. A game designer understands their game completely and intuitively, which is exactly why they are poorly positioned to write the document that explains it to someone with zero context.
  • Until publishers treat rule book production as a non-negotiable line item rather than an afterthought squeezed into the final weeks of production, we will keep having this conversation...
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