Mage Knight Review & How to Play

0:07 hey guys Tyler with meele mountain here bringing you another board game review this time from our friends at Whiz Kids games who have given us a doozy of a game to review it is the Mage Knight Ultimate Edition box there is a lot packed into this game uh at its core this is a deck builder sandbox Adventure game for one to five players so there's a solo mode uh this goes all the way up to 5 this is packed with all kinds of expansion content as well that adds even more to this game uh this is heralded it's an older game really but it's viewed as one of the best out there in the industry especially in that deck builder sandbox run with things uh it has a pretty high complexity so there's a lot to cover so I'm going to do the 30,000 foot View for the interest of time I'm not going to get into every detail of everything in this game as there really is a lot um learning this was a joy and a privilege but it really was a big bite so we're going to do a highle overview of this game talk about what you can expect to find in the Box as well as the general kind of gist of what you're doing and the interactions that you can hope to find in this game and I'll tell you why I really enjoyed playing this of course you have me at deck builder I'm already in uh but there is a lot of really really awesome content in this box I'm excited to get you to the table uh so you can see it all so with that said let's jump in and learn how to play Mage KN welcome to the world of Mage Knight a game So Glorious and large I can barely fit most of the components on one shot like this here this is a deck building sandbox Adventure game for one to five

1:37 players where you will take on the role of a hero a hero with an asymmetric deck of starting cards setting out to claim and defeat a certain scenario there are many scenarios set throughout Mage Knight but today we'll be focusing on a three-player setup for one of the main competitive scenarios which I would say is kind of the standard Mage night experience that you can expect to find in this game in this game you will be running through what you'll be building as a randomized set of map tiles as you search for one of these many cities that are set out throughout the land the lower Brown map tiles will actually reveal these cities and you'll be attempting to overthrow the evil forces that occupy them and claim them for yourself all the while doing various adventures and actions throughout the board as you discover them to gain them all important Fame as you claim Fame your hero will actually move up this track they'll level up gain new actions skills and abilities increasing their hand size and their starting armor value all with the intent of purpose of having the most Fame at the end of a predetermined number of day and night rounds you will be playing your uh entire deck of cards in each of these rounds so you'll be wanting to make your deck more and more powerful as you go you'll do this by adding in spells empowered actions or even hiring units to fight alongside you all of this will begin to continue to build your unique asymmetry as you you try to write your Legend here in the world of Mage KN you'll want to manage your reputation carefully with the locals as well as that can have a positive or negative

3:08 impact in the actions you take you'll also be collecting these glowing Mana crystals here which will Empower your actions and spells to make you even more powerful having the correct build and combos in your deck is vital to set yourself apart from your opponents there is a lot of interactions that you'll have on the map as this entire deck of cards here lays out all of the various things that you can discover and find and these are all of the different enemy tokens and interactions that you can have on the map so there is a lot to get into and unpack here and as I mentioned it's really too much to talk about all of the details in one review video but what I want to do is give you all a snapshot of what you can expect to encounter in the standard competitive mode of the game and so we're going to break this down and we're going to take little bites we're going to take looks at each of these pieces and build them all together so that you can walk away from this video confident that you understand how to play a game of Mage night and what to expect when you jump into a game so with that said let's take a closer look at a player character as well as the fame board the round tracker and the actions that you'll take on a given round let's talk a little more about that and then we'll zoom in and look at the cards and enemy types that you can hope to encounter in a game of Mage Knight all right first things first to get into a game of Mage Knight we need to understand our character right we're taking on the role of a Mage Knight and we need to understand what we're bringing to the table so to speak so here is a layout of one of the Maite characters that you can play uh in Ultimate Edition which is crang crang is this cool looking uh kind of orcish uh Druid type character like a shaman

4:40 almost and it kind of shines through in some of his cards those shamanic abilities and so you would take on the role of a particular Mage Knight there are several to choose from and you can pick one and you'll take on their character and all of their components and this is kind of What minus these a general starting setup would look like you're going to have a deck of 16 cards uh it is is relatively similar to everyone else's set except you'll have two unique cards to your character in there so you'll have a little bit of difference in flavor there that will kind of show through and shine through with that you're going to have a stack of these little tokens here you'll have one that's blank that will start out here this is corresponding to units that you'll control and it tells you how many units that you can actually control units are a type of card that you can kind of hire and they'll work with you kind of as part of your team they'll have different abilities that you can choose to activate it's just a different way to build your character out and they're very very helpful um as you level your character up this shows your current level but once you reach the next level Benchmark this will come down and become another controllable unit and you'll actually level your character up increasing potentially your hand size as well as your core armor we'll talk about what Armor class means as well as hand size a little bit more as we go you'll have a lot of flags flags are used for placing your uh kind of Fame down on places as you complete different things control keeps or dungeons or Towers Mage Towers City ities you'll start putting your flags down to show the things that you've done and the things that you control this is in this scenario that we're talking about a competitive game and so you may actually be trying to rest control away from another character

6:12 another Mage Knight who set out so if they took over a city you might want to take that City to take that Fame away from them is there's lots of Fame to be earned at the end of the game for the things that you control so this is a little bit of an area control Style game so these flags are very important these face up items would not be face up in a game they'll be all face down but these are the potential skills that this character can unlock and as you can see you might already start to get overwhelmed if you zoom in and want to look at some of these abilities some of them make a little bit of sense some of them you may have no idea what the heck these things mean and that's okay uh it was a challenge for me as well but thankfully there's a nice little cheat sheet that walks you through what each of those abilities do and as you level up again something else that you will get to do is acquire some of these skills not all of them thankfully uh but some of them to build out your play style as you go throughout the game of Mage Knight as you gain Fame you'll level up and be able to access some of these skills that will give your character an edge some unique asymmetry that feels very crang in this case right uh and you'll be able to utilize those to build your play style out whatever leans you and leads you to victory so this is what you'll bring into a game of Mage Knight with you this is what you'll start with but it is certainly not where you will end uh there are lots of different things that you can activate and gain abilities to with spells uh with Advanced actions and all kinds of things but let's take a look a little bit more at the base cards that you have and talk about how some card play works then we'll take a look at the main boards and talk about how you gain Fame and reputation and what rounds look like

7:44 all right here we have a look at some of the cards that you'll find in your starting deck and I want to talk about kind of how card play Works what you can kind of expect from it and we'll talk a little bit about rounds so again you have a 16 card starting deck of cards this is still cranks stuff let's say he was level three in this case but really rounds of the game are going to go where you every turn on your turn you will have this many number of cards in your hand in this case five and you can play any number of cards that you want for your turn you will then draw back up to your hand size it'll go to the next player this will go until somebody has run out of cards to draw or wants to say that they are ending the turn when they can't draw any more cards they can end the round every other player will get one more turn and then the round will end most scenarios have a set number of rounds that you as a player are able to engage in and then the game will end so it's another way that kind of the game will end we're playing through so many rounds whoever gets the most points wins so those rounds are very important the rounds also become day and night which affects a lot of things we'll take a look at that and talk a little more about that once you guys have a little bit of an understanding on cards and how they work so there are several types of cards in the game and we'll take a look at some of them here most of the cards as you notice are going to kind of have a top and a bottom these symbols up here on the top kind of tell you what general style of card they might be whether it's for influencing or acting with people kind of utility cards combat cards but generally um your base deck is going to kind of be a nice smattering of all of those types of things from things that allow you to influence to attack or

9:16 block things that allow you to move in the instance of swiftness here that will let you move around the board um all of these things are important and as you take your turn you can kind of choose what action you want to take on your turn and play cards that will allow you to take that particular action for instance movement if I had multiple cards with movement values I can play multiple cards together to gain an increased movement speed for my move that turns you're not limited to one card per action you can stack cards together whatever is most beneficial to you same with influence and same with attack now you'll notice there's a bottom action that may be different like in the case of swiftness or may just be better like in the case of Promise here well these cards need Mana to be powered up and so that's a big aspect of Mage Knight is that you're trying to manage your mana and use it appropriately now there's three ways that you can gain Mana there's different colors of Mana as well there are kind of the base colors of Mana which is going to be uh the white the green the blue and the red there's also going to be day or night specific Manas which is gold or black now to use these cards you will need to have the appro Mana matching the basee color of them black Mana is only usable at night and actually makes very specific cards incredibly powerful and you'll know we'll kind of look at some of those when we get there but these are great for spells they really make spells super super powerful gold Mana is only usable during the day rounds and it acts

10:46 as a wild Mana so it can be used for any of the Mana that you need now these little tokens here that look really fun they kind of are doing double work right now they can be called Mana tokens for the instance here you see uh concentration lets me gain a specific type of Mana token tokens kind of come out here and sit on the board and can be used but they're use it or lose it if I end my turn they go away we don't get those anymore they're gone if they sit in my board they actually these tokens represent what are called Mana crystals which is different than a Mana token uh crystals will stay with me from round to round the Only Rule is I can't have three of the same three or more of the same type of Mana Crystal here so I couldn't have four green Mana crystals sitting in my inventory I'd have to diversify um so these tokens do a lot of double work but to use the empowered version of a particular type of card I need to have the right type of Mana token Mana Crystal or Mana Dice and we'll look at Mana dice in just a second but I would spend it to empower that card to let me use the more powerful version of it so that's another way that you can use cards you basically pick do I want to take the base ability do I want to empower with Mana to use the bottom more powerful ability you'll notice in the case of swiftness these things change entirely it goes from movement to ranged attacking and we'll talk about about you know the attack rounds and how that works a little bit later but some of these cards will change drastically uh based on what action you choose to take but just know that the bottom of any of these printed cards needs the Mana symbol green red blue for instance to activate that bottom ability and that's how the general idea of card play Works

12:16 something else about cards is you can always choose to play them sideways when you play another card for instance I played an influence four card I can always play this sideways as a wild card to add a base ability one so in instance I could make this an influence one card if I play it sideways to make this play an influence of five you can do this for movement you can do this for attacking you can do this for influence uh there's lots of ways that you can use your cards so you have to kind of strategize what you want to accomplish most with your cards knowing that you're going to go through basically your entire deck each round so you want to make sure you build good synergies and strategies into your cards as you go to make sure that you have the cards available to you to maximize your Fame generation and push your kind of uh unique strategy forward throughout the rounds of Mage Knight so with a again very rushed but very general understanding of how cards work let's zoom over and take a look at the kind of giant board about Fame and reputation talk about how rounds actually work and take a look at the Mana dice all right here we have the fame and reputation board some tactics cards the round tracker and the turn order for the three characters that we have in this setup which is crang tovak and noras so these are our three characters and this would be a setup that you would see starting out in the general game of Mage Knight again this is for the competitive scenario there's lots of ways this could be but this is pretty much what you can expect to find in the base game so let's talk through it all here you have your Fame tracker Fame is made in a lot of different ways throughout the game of Mage Knight but predominantly you're going to make it by

13:48 taking over keeps and Mage towers and castles and cities defeating particular enemies that you find throughout the Border maybe even doing some nasty stuff like assaulting monasteries or trying to raid Villages there's all kinds of ways that you can make this Fame but as your character makes Fame they move up the track whenever they kick into a new Zone they get the level up ability that is shown on that particular section and it really just oscillates between two level up options which is basically you gain an advanced action card and a skill for your character or if you come down to these sections with the kind of the circle you will move one of your tokens over like I showed on uh cr's character that can actually increase your hand size and your basee defense basee defense is super super important uh when it comes to combat as to how much damage you can soak before you start taking wounds so getting that up is very helpful so generating Fame is of course the goal to the game in general because that's how you win but it is also important to level your character up quickly to make them as competitive and advanced as possible so you can make more and more Fame it's a really fun Snowball Effect they have going here this is the reputation track and it goes infinitely uh to the negative and up to plus five on the positive the actions that you take in the world of Mage Knight will affect your reputation there are lots of ways to affect your reputation Again by sacking monasteries and Villages that will obviously make it go down this is basically reflective of the general populace is view towards you if you liberate cities and defeat certain monsters and help people this

15:19 will go up and a positive and neat aspect of the game is based on your reputation doing bad things can sometimes have short-term gain but this will also affect the cost of cards and units that you want to recruit to your cause if you have a very positive reputation with the locals as you go to recruit units you will actually notice that they're cheaper for you to recruit because of this cost this actually acts as basically free currency that you would need to pay to recruit influence in this game uh to get those characters this also acts as a negative where you have to pay more influence to try and get units to your cause so having this tracker and maintaining a positive reputation can be a strategy there are some low uh reputation strategies that I've seen played as well but predominantly having a high reputation can be very helpful in getting a lot of discounts to move your influence throughout the game along and influence is used in a lot of various ways so having this High reputation can be very helpful so this is kind of the general flow of the game now we talked about how this game works in rounds I just want to kind of repeat it and make sure it's as clear as possible since this game is so complicated this game is broken into a series of rounds that are played out through turns where players will play their hand size worth of cards every turn running through their deck of cards until someone is out of cards to draw when they do they signal the end of the round and that round will conclude with every other player getting a turn then we'll move into the next round and most scenarios have a certain amount of rounds rounds also oscillate between daytime and nighttime rounds that

16:49 changes the Mana that can be used here again gold or black Mana as we talked about in the previous video section and also changes the movement cost for certain things things we'll talk about that in just a minute you'll notice these little dice that I've been moving here these are called The Source Dice and we're going to roll these at the start of every round to see what kind of Mana is in play so I rolled these randomly at the start of our little setup here but this would show the type of Mana that's available from the source and usually on a turn you can only get one Mana from The Source the ratio is two more than the number of players so there's three so we have five um these will allow you to also power up your ability so you don't always need Mana tokens or crystals you can use Dice from the source but if you don't have something that you can use here you're kind of out of luck also if you in this case during day rolled a black Dy it just goes away because we can't use black Mana at a nighttime phase so this could be very limited pool based on the roll these will keep getting rerolled as they're used and spent and so this will always change it's not a reliable Mana source so if you want to make sure you have the right Mana you do want to think about generating tokens and crystals so this is how kind of those Source die will work at the start of every round of the game you will choose attack based on the day or the night tactics deck and that will choose your turn order as well as some type as you can see here of super nice special ability potentially effectively the later that you go uh in the turn order the better ability that it is but of course going late has a lot of ramifications as you won't get some Discovery bonuses you'll be literally behind in terms of Discovery uh there's

18:20 lots of things that can happen so going early is generally nice in this game but there are some reasons why you might want to go later because you can get some really nice bonuses from the cards and these are unique the night deck is different than the day deck for tactics and so there's lots of gameplay that changes based on the day or night rounds of the game as well looking here at the round board you'll also see these numbers on these hex's this is going to tell you the amount of movement points that it takes to move into one of these types of zones or from one of these types of zones so we'll see that grasslands are going to be too they the cheapest type of thing that you can move around in while forests are a little more expensive during the day but there's kind of a gray number here that shows you that they're way more difficult to navigate at night inversely deserts are very hot and terrible to navigate during the day and cost five movement points but are much easier at night when they're cool and only cost three so terrain will actually shift as you switch between the rounds as well and the difficulty of moving around those types of terrain so that I think this is something I really enjoyed with MJ night is I like that the the map feels alive as you go through the rounds and things change you have to calculate and plan for those types of actions anyway once players have chosen their tactics cards for the round uh you're going to slot in these tokens here just to show turn order of who's going next and these will shift of course based on every round who picks what tactic card and that's going to be the flow of the game you'll go like this uh kind of going back and forth to day and night rounds throughout a series of rounds uh predetermined by the scenario that you're playing until they're done and then you'll tally up and see who has the

19:51 most Fame at the end of the game and whoever has the most is Victorious becomes the most notorious or famous Mage Knight in the Kingdom let's go ahead and take a look now at the rest of the cards there are four decks of cards that you can effectively navigate to add things to your deck that are positive and there's one that adds things to your deck that are negative so let's take a look at all of those and talk about what you can try to build into your deck because of course we love deck building uh so let's jump in and take a look at those all right there's a lot to jump into on this particular shot but let's dive in there are five total types of decks of cards that will be added to your deck throughout a game of mage night and as I mentioned four of these are good things things that you want and one of them is bad so let's start with the bad shall we uh up here on the top left we have the wound deck these are all just base single cards with blood drops wounds are bad they clog your deck up in a terribly mean and malicious F fashion in Mage Knight uh they are going to be taken on through combat and they can go to your units that you control we'll talk about units in just a second but they also will go to your personal hand and what sucks about wound cards is they go into your your hand and they don't they don't leave they don't get discarded it's not even as bad as just like oh I have a hand clogged with wounds I'll get rid of them and next hand will be better they stay with you and they can be terrible and so as you take on wounds your hand size effectively becomes smaller and smaller until you can heal or remove these wounds in some way throughout the game and so getting a lot of wounds can be incredibly crippling in a game of Mage Knight and is not to be underestimated there are some abilities

21:23 and and monsters that will actually add them to your deck and your hand which is even worse uh and so these can be very very that's why there's you know there's so many of them is because there's a lot of ways that the enemies want to add these to your hand and you've got a plan to manage and mitigate those gains uh very very carefully next we have units there are basic units and elite units uh indicated by silver and gold backing here the game always is going to have what's called a unit offer and there's going to be kind of a store General deck building kind of store rules there'll always be three of certain sets out none of a certain set out and then a bunch of these guys out as well uh and those will reset on people's turns uh these will not actually reset until the end of the round on the unit offer and that means that it's kind of first come first served on who gets what types of units the basic units are going to be tier two or tier one units based on the top right hand side they're going to have a cost on the left that's going to show you how much influence You' need to spend to get them where you can get them in this little kind of striped little ribbon Medallion thing here it tells you where you need to go to get them their Armor class which is how many hits they can take before they suffer a wound when they suffer a wound they're not usable until they're field and what kind of abilities they add there's lots of abilities so we'll kind of break down some general rundown of abilities when we get into combat but they can do lots of things they can help you move they can help you peek at things they can do some Siege or range attacks they definitely like to attack they can help you block all kinds of stuff these units can fit into any type of play style and generally they're all good it's just can you afford them and do you want to build

22:54 your deck around them so the thing to know about units elite units will only come out when certain effects tell you to put them out and they'll actually add on to the deck of things and as you'll notice they are uh much higher tier and much higher cost they can go up to I believe it's tier five uh and they'll have way better abilities and do really really neat stuff but they're super expensive on influence so you have to make sure or they may even have in this case requirements that your reputation be at certain levels high or low uh to get certain cards in the elite unit deck and so there's a lot of strategy that kind of builds around who you want to add to your deck the cool thing about units is they're always out they don't actually go into your deck uh that's a bit of a misleading statement on my part they actually go into your command and so units that you command are indicated by how many of these little tokens that you have and so you'll put the unit under one of these little tokens you start the game with one of them there so everybody can have one unit under their command as you level your character up as we saw on the fame track these will actually come off of your board and show uh you know your new armor value and hand size and will actually flip down here so you'll end up having multiple of these meaning you can have multiple units as you command a unit you can actually move this to show that I'm activating a unit and you can choose one of the abilities on that unit to use that unit's exhausted then until the end of the round when you'll refresh them and get them back unless you have an ability or something that states that you can refresh units before them so having units is great because not only are they a valuable asset to your strategy they also stay out all the time and are always available and you don't have to kind of wait on you to lock into

24:25 them in your hand next we have art facts up here they're kind of shown by this like brass thick edging uh they are never available or shown in the store they're not really something you can just purchase willy-nilly you have to earn them and you'll get them through doing various things on the board and we'll take a look at that in just a second but getting into Mage Towers can sometimes grant them exploring in dungeons will certainly sometimes grant them there's lots of ways that you can try to get these cards but they're never available for you to just purchase you have to do an action and overcome some obstacles to be able to find these particular cards next up we have spells spells are down here on the bottom left they're always going to be these purple looking cards and they again as you notice have kind of two actions on them and they're usually um very very powerful the top action you'll see still cost some form of um mana and we'll kind of show you in the top left what the general strategy or type of card it is but you'll always have to spend Mana for spells because of course you need Mana for spells on the bottom these are very very powerful effects if you take the time to look at these you'll see that they do some crazy stuff but they often often cost multiple mana and often cost black Mana now if you remember what we talked about in the rounds and with Mana before black Mana can only be used at the nighttime and you can have that as a Mana Crystal a Mana token or from the source but it's only usable on every other round during nighttime phases which means these actions could only be cast on those rounds but they are super powerful so there's an interesting EB and flow to the game as well where during the day because of gold Mana things are pretty flexible and easy to do you can kind of get a lot done but if

25:56 you really want to do some heavy-hitting combat you might want to plan around some evening actions during night phases because that's when the Black Mana comes out that's when your spells are really really potent so there's some fun stuff you can do there if you want to kind of go a mage style to the build leaning more into the Mage than the Knight on the other side here we have advanced actions these are kind of your typical deck building store cards these are more of the same kinds of cards that you had in your starting deck they of course are double edged just like we talked about with the initial cards where you need Mana for the bottom action these are just better cards more cards there will always be some of these available in the store and you can purchase one of those cards uh and add them to your deck in certain ways and the main way that you'll be doing that is through the advanced action is leveling up there's also uh rewards on cards and Dungeons and things that will grant you these cards and so these are things you'll want to get into your deck as well because they are just better versions a lot of times of your base cards so all of this plays into your strategy of how you make your Mage Knight unique and stand out and then your prepared to actually move around the map and engage with your enemies and explore Dungeons and do all the cool things that Mage Knight lets you do so let's jump in and take a look at those cool things talk a little bit about map movement exploration enemies and then we'll jump into the all important explanation about combat all right here we have the starting map setup for that three-player game that we were talking about when you build the map there's some simple rules about putting the numbers a certain way and making sure that stars and circles line up but this is a general layout for

27:26 a starting map with two of our characters already on here one of my favorite characters noras and tovak over here sitting up as well there's lots of things on the map and we got to remember our movement cost to move around day or night uh depending on where we're at but this is a magical portal and this is always going to be your starting tile and on your turn you're going to place your dude here to start the game and then you'll move away and someone else would start place here and move so on and so forth there's lots of stuff on the map and this entire deck of cards pretty much is a breakdown of all of the things things that are on this map and again that's too much to go into but I just want to kind of point out a few things we have here we have mines crystal mines those will give you Mana tokens of a particular type Mana crystals of that particular color there's some healing Glades that if you go there you're able to actually heal wounds in your hand that can be great there's some Villages where you can have specific interactions to heal or hire units and do all kinds of different things there will be monasteries here we have a fort or a keep keeps have enemy units guarding them we wouldn't know what this is but if I flip that over we'll see that there's an enemy there that we can defeat for a certain amount of Fame we'll kind of look at that more these swords on the board will actually drop down these marauding Orcs that want to run around and do all kinds of nonsense uh and there's lots of fun things to be had here now this board actually kind of builds out uh in an open format where we'll want to go and explore now as we go um we will be getting types of tiles there's two colors of tiles there's what's called kind of basic beginner tiles and core tiles um we if we go on the edges of the map we'll actually be unlocking these

28:56 yellow tiles these kind of beginner tiles as we kind of expand from the coastline here and as we open these up they're going to be good things but generally they're nicer tiles the core tiles are more challenging have better rewards tougher enemies but they have the most important thing which is the cities we're trying to find as cities are a huge huge huge part of the game and give you some pretty powerful Buffs so let's just say hypothetically I was playing as tovak and I wanted to explore if I wanted to come over here and explore this region I could move over here and the moment you would move into an unexplored region you'll take one of the tiles of the corresponding type and you oop I bumped my little camera you will flip that over and you will set that tile and Orient it based on those kind of rules that we discussed before uh where you need to make sure your stars and your tiles line up correctly so for instance I could place this tile here to follow the coastline as the circle and the Stars line up if I wanted to move this way if I wanted to move into the interior I could also potentially get a Core tile which would have to follow the same alignment rules with the numbers aligning properly and the stars aligning properly something like this would be a legal placement for this tile here and I would notice that I've actually found one of the cities that can come into play as well and the cities will have various levels depending on the player count and the difficulty of the scenario and those are prime locations to be conquered they're very powerful they come with multiple stacks of enemies on them uh and those enemies are fortified and very powerful and challenging and so you you're not

30:27 going to just wander yourself into a city but whenever you reveal a tile for whatever reason you will populate that section with tokens for instance here we have a mage tower that would put this down and we also see that we have a uh orc token here that would come down for the marauding Orcs same here where we would place a keep token into this location and a draconum here uh who wants to run around of course the draconum are super super scary so there's all kinds of effects and things that will happen on the board but this is the general flow as you'll go exploring and opening up the board discovering the world together as a as a table which is a very fun kind of exploratory sandbox environment now just because you know this player here toak opened this section that doesn't mean that another player can't come in and try to engage on any of these things it's just who is opening where and how are you spreading out and exploring the board I've seen games where people kind of wander off people will stick together some games there's different ways that you can play and interact uh but there's lots of fun that can be had here now as we mentioned there are lots of things to fight and interact with on the board in the game of Mage Knight there are PVP options if you are playing a competitive game if you ever move into a space with another player you would engage in PvP which is a unique combat situation I'm going to cover the general combat which is the PVE combat which happens when you move onto uh keeps Mage Towers Orcs things like that or with face up enemy tokens like draconum or Orcs if you're ever adjacent to them and move and would still be adjacent to them so kind of just swinging around them they will actually engage in combat with you so you can't just kind of flank around them

31:58 they they become a buffer on the map and so you will have to deal unfortunately with these enemies and when you engage in combat you will move to a combat moment in the game so let's go ahead and kind of zoom in and talk about what combat looks like and how that works between a player character and any of the environmental effects on theard all right I've gone and done it I have started combat with an enemy uh I'm going to be fighting these little orc Marauders these little log riding looking guys here here and let's just say that I'm playing as noas here and this is his current level this is early in the game he only has an armor value of two he has no units with him his hand of five and this is his five cards in this hypothetical scenario we've got the wounds nice and close so that we're ready for those when we need them now combat in Mite is very fun it's quick it's clean it's very calculable and I really love it but let's kind of talk about the the symbology that we're seeing on kind of a basic enemy here and we'll talk about combat and then we'll look at some other examples so this particular enemy is going to hit for three physical damage which is kind of the base type of damage it's the type of damage that we do uh predominantly when we start the game this is their armor value is how much damage you need to deal uh you need to meet or exceed that armor value to kill them and this is how much fame or victory points you're going to get when you beat them if you beat them any abilities that they may have would be listed here any attack abilities would be listed here these guys don't have any attack abilities but they are fortified we'll talk about what fortification kind of means now combat is a very very simple flow in the game of Mage Knight it happens

33:29 like this we have ranged attacks if there are any for us we can choose to do a ranged fight to hit them first like a first strike if that kills them we're done we're good life is great if we don't kill them then we shouldn't do it at all because it doesn't stack you don't weaken them or anything like that then the enemy attacks us and we have to decide if we how we can tank or divide or take the damage that they would deal then we get a chance to do melee damage back to the enemy to hopefully defeat them if not then all of this was in Vin and that's an entire round of combat you don't do multiple rounds it's just one do you meet or exceed their armor value or not that's pretty much the question that you have in a game of combat and Mage Knight and I love it so let's walk through this so this is our armor value in hand this is their armor value so if we could in this case with swiftness do a ranged attack we see that we do have a ranged attack down here we see it's ranged attack three we could play a white Mana if we had one from the source or from a token from our character with crystals whatever we can play this card to do range attack three we see that it's three that's going to deal three damage to an enemy if they did not have this symbol three damage to this enemy would be enough to defeat it hooray we've done the game we've won everything is great uh we would get two Fame this token goes away life moves on perfect combat except this particular enemy here has fortified fortified means that range attacks don't work against them it has to be a Siege attack and we'll kind of talk about that it's a type of card it is a more powerful version of a ranged attack acts just like a ranged attack in the timing of com combat but is better than ranged attack Siege attacks work in

35:00 cities or un fortified enemies ranged attacks do not um you can add Siege attacks and range attacks together to increase the strength of a ranged attack but you can't add ranged attacks to Siege attacks you just can play Siege attacks so in this case we can't defeat this enemy with ranged attacks with the hand that we have so we have to move on now we get into their chance to hit us they're going to deal three physical damage to us and there's a couple options now that are available to us we can try to block that damage um it's kind of an All or Nothing situation here as well where we have to meet or exceed the amount of damage being dealt to block it otherwise we end up taking the damage so we do see that we have a block five here uh if we wanted to kind of go into that but when we're thinking about our hands and what we want to do and making sure we defeat them we might choose not to do that we can choose to take that damage if we take that damage we could assign it uh to units based on their armor value if we had any as I mentioned we do not have any units so what we do is we actually have to take some wounds and the way this works is we have to take a wound to our hand unfortunately that's no fun we'll put him over here because we can't use that card for now uh this will clog our hand up it'll stay with us we won't be able to discard it and then we would reduce the damage coming in by our armor value in this case by two unfortunately we're still receiving another damage which means we have to take another wound and then we would reduce it by two which goes down to zero or negative numbers now we've soaked all the damage that they're trying to inflict upon us and it's our chance to attack now in this case we know that we need to deal three damage fortification means nothing on melee for us so we would actually be able to play these two cards rage and

36:30 determination together to add attack two an attack two to make an attack four and be able to defeat this monster inversely we could also play rage and play Stamina if we wanted to sideways as an attack one to make an attack three to defeat this monster there's lots of flexibility in your card play and how you want to do things but ultimately as you kind of go through combat uh you'll want to make sure that you think about can I meet or exceed their values for both defense and offense to make sure that I'm able to beat and defeat these monsters any wounds that you take into your hand just stay there your other cards may be discarded and gone but these will count towards your five hand limit so next turn I would only get to draw three cards from my deck instead of five really uh so I'm going to want to work to get rid of these wounds as soon as possible either way if we defeat the monster we'll gain the fame on the bottom and our turn will be able to continue if we want to take more actions now this was a pretty basic kind of enemy there are lots of enemies for instance here's an example of a draconum this draconum has lots of stats that may be very confusing we see he's worth seven points which is awesome he's evasive which means he has seven defense or 14 defense and that depends on if we block his whole attack if we block everything he deals to us he's only seven defense if we take any of the damage from him it's 14 defense so he's very hard to beat we see that he has a frost resistance which means we're not able to deal damage to him with cold spells or cold attacks we'd have to deal damage with fire cold fire physical to try and get around that actually I think physical is also reduced on this he does

38:00 ice attacks to us which means he's going to deal a lot of damage to us and we have to be able to defend that with fire defense to block it cold fire defense to block it and if we use ice or basic defense like these Block cards here their effect is Hal so these block twos would only be block one so we' need a lot of card play to try and block that damage so this is a very powerful monster he also has um his speed ability here as well which means he's going to hit us really really hard uh with some unique abilities called Swift which is if he has Swift he's basically even harder to block uh and you have to play blocks that basically double his value so instead of four for blocking him we need to block eight so this is a very very powerful monster which is why he's worth so many points here's another example of an enemy that you could find in a mage Tower he as you see has physical and Fire Resistance he does fire damage and he has an ability called brutal which is he does all of his damage to the heroes he basically basically ignores um any uh units that we may want to block he wants to hit us if we block uh if we fail to block his attack he does double his damage to us so instead of three he would be dealing six to us so there's all kinds of enemies these are just a smattering of the potential options that you can find uh in a game of Mage Knight but you can begin to see how the concept of combat is honestly very quick and clean and simple but the intricacy comes into play when you think about your deck what you have available and what you're fighting against because there are so many types of defensive abilities offensive abilities damage types damage

39:31 resistances and all of that plays into a beautiful Math game that you have to play in your head as you go through a game of Mage Knight I really enjoy the way combat works but I just want to flag there's a lot of symbology that you've got to learn to fully Master this game and that in the world's largest nutshell is how you play Mage Knight and can jump in and have a really good time with this game game play will kind of continue like this with players taking turns until the rounds that are set out in your scenario completed Whoever has the most Fame wins it's a nice quick and clean game there are achievements at the end of the game where you'll be getting additional Fame for how many spells you have whoever has the most gets points how many cities you control how many things you control um just different kind of accolades achievement style things that you'll be battling it out with your opponents for uh will give you additional Fame once that's all tallied up whoever has the most Fame is the Victor uh and the scenarios do lay out different conditions again this is just the main kind of competitive scenario but there are cooperatives there are solos there's ones where the victory conditions are entirely different uh one where you're fighting like kind of a playable character boss General that you need to hunt down and defeat him there's all kinds of different ways that you can play and they're all really fun and engaging um again just to kind of clarify overall review and feeling about this game is super positive I love deck builders I love sandbox games this is my kind of game I really enjoy it you've got these beautiful pre painted Miniatures you've got these kind of nice like hero clicks style cities that shows the level and how many enemies you'll be fighting all of that is really cool really meaningful really engaging to me there are some cons or negatives that you need to think about as you consider purchasing this game uh one is which I

41:02 joked about it before but literally this deck of cards is just basically the reference guide to tell me on the board what do all these things mean and what do they all do and how do they all work now thankfully they're all here and I can find them very easily and kind of move along but that's a lot to put in your memory banks you know just to know like oh that symbol means this and that goes here and this means I can use influences like there's just a lot of ifs than and uh all the you connectivity and interactions on the board uh kind of laid out in all these cards there's just a lot to keep track of thankfully there's three rule books to help you keep track of it there's the very very helpful game walkthrough which I love the game rulebook which is a little verbose but still very good and the expansion rule book which is somehow bigger than the main rule book uh but all of these things are really helpful to help you understand the game and walk you through it it's just a game that it helps to have and play the first time with someone who already knows what they're doing because it's such a big bite for how everything works intera together now the ultimate edition just adds in the expansions that were in uh kind of out there in the world with Mage Knight they've kind of Consolidated it all into one big box it gives you more playable characters it gives you new enemies and spell kind of more of everything U more you know unique types of units that have to have like reputation requirements um new scenarios there's different ways that you can play now like I said there's one where you have like these giant Mana wheels that change as you kind of interact with these factions on the board uh there's lots there there's a ton of scenarios in the base game as well that give you cooperative competitive solo um different game in conditions but this again was kind of just showing you the main what I enjoy just the main

42:33 competitive game where you're dropped in you're trying to kind of take these cities back from the evil forces that are oppressing them and get the most Fame there's some achievements that you'll be fighting with other people for for like most spells most things controlled most flags on the board um but at the end of the game you'll tally up your your Fame and that's it just whoever has the most Fame wins it's nice it's quick it's clean um I joke it's not necessarily quick it this game can be a little long uh I showed you a game with three I think I think three is a really sweet spot number to play this game with um playing it with five I can't imagine I played it with four and the game drug very very long we did have a lot of teaching things but still this is probably a three four hour game even with experienced players uh so that is a bit of a a time commitment but for all of that for the price of this game you are getting infinite replayability infinite fun uh if you like deck builder sandbox style games this is one that you should definitely check out it's an old game and it still stands in my opinion very much on its own it stands on its own two legs there are some aspects where you can tell it's dated uh there are certain things that I'm just like oh we've seen games kind of fix that or do different things than that since then but this game for its for its age for how long it's been around is incredible uh it it deserves its complexity rating on BG but it also deserves its rating on BGG this is a quality game that if you've not gotten a chance to play as a gamer I certainly encourage you to get this one kind of off your shelf and give it a try get it played just like TI John company a few other I feel like this is one of those games that just you should at least Play Once to kind of check it off your board game Bingo list because it is so so incredible so I want to thank Whiz Kids for letting us get a review of this get this out there to

44:04 show you guys I'd encourage you guys to check out Mage night it is very very fun I had a blast with it I'm going to be playing this again with my buddies in the next couple weeks here before the holidays um there's a lot of fun to to have I want to keep bringing this one back to the table and I think you guys will too so with all that said thank you so much for coming to meele mountain to check out our content I hope you'll continue to do so like And subscribe hit the Bell let us know you're enjoying our content we love putting out more stuff for you guys because we love board games U but yeah thank you guys so much for coming and checking this out and as always happy gaming thanks for checking out this video I hope you enjoyed it check out these links to find some other games you might want to bring to the table this is Tyler Williams signing off