I hear talk about “grail games”, the idea that everyone has that one game they are looking for that is the Holy Grail of games–at least for them. The game that hits all the right notes. Checks every box. Theme, mechanics, size, playtime, tactility–a choir of components harmonizing perfectly in the eyes, ears and noggin of the player. I tried to never focus too heavily on the concept. I didn’t want to buy into the idea that “the one” game was out there for me. But what I didn’t realize was I, like the rest of the randos on the internet, was in search of my grail game.
Which makes me Indiana Jones. Minus the hat and the athleticism.
Long story less long, I think I found it. My grail game. Or at least, it’s very, very close. I had been laboring over the task of how to spend my Christmas money (a true burden). I knew I wanted to buy a game, which is a big deal for me. I build a lot of print and plays, but I don’t actually own many retail games.
After much agonizing, price checking and tweaking of an extensive pro/con list, I decided on Mistfall: Heart of the Mists. It’s the standalone expansion to Mistfall. Heart of the Mists (HoTM) is the heaviest game I own by a good margin, cresting over the 4.0 weight rating on BGG. It’s a high fantasy combat adventure game, featuring more combat than adventure. It involves some light deckbuilding with moderate character progression, brain-burning Euro combat mechanics, and lore for days. If that sounds awesome, it’s because it is.
Shall we review my grail list?
- Immersive fantasy theme? Check.
- Dice-less combat? Check.
- A Euro-style puzzle with difficult decisions? Check check check.
- Good solo or co-op? Yes and yes.
- Compact table presence? Uh, no. Definitely no.
- Short playtime? Oops, no.
- Easy to save your game and play over multiple sessions? Um…
Ok, so I guess it it doesn’t check every box. Which is what spurred my desire to shrink it. After one play, I knew this would be my next big (little) project. I wanted to be able to play Mistfall over my lunch break, or on a coffee table after the kids are in bed.
Everything came together at once, actually. I saw a Facebook post about a print and play file available for the original Mistfall game, along with a few other titles in the Mistfall universe. So I bought the file and realized I now had everything I needed to make a nice-looking mini version of Mistfall true to its source material.
Card Economy
Mistfall has nearly 400 cards, along with some cardboard player boards, game boards and map tiles. When I shrink a game, my goal is typically to distill it down to 18 cards, a fairly universal convention in the industry right now for a micro game. So I started brainstorming how I could accomplish this. Some of the solutions were pretty straightforward, requiring only double-sided cards and some smushed content:
- Put 6 enemies on each enemy card (front and back) instead of just one.
- Pack 8 locations into a single card instead of a large number of map tiles.
- Condense the game boards (quest charter and time charter) into a single card.
- Fit 8 encounters into 2 cards instead of 1 encounter per card.
- Reduce the game from 6 characters to 1. A shame, but necessary, and potentially remedied by expansions.
Those were relatively easy decisions to make. But then I had to decide what to do about the hero cards. These are the cards your hero uses to do stuff. Deal damage to enemies, lower their enemy focus (a track that makes bad things happen the more and cooler stuff you do), draw cards, etc. Most heroes have about 14 cards in their starting deck, and will add roughly 3-6 more to it by the end of the game by purchasing advanced cards and receiving reward gear.
The advanced cards players can add to their deck come from a massive stack of available upgrades. This allows players to build their characters out along different paths of their choice. Want to be a healer? Buy some restoration cards. Just care about punching monsters in the face? Stack your deck with aggressive attack cards. I resolved to preserve this variety and choice in my mini version as much as possible. It’s what we love about dungeon crawls, and games in general. We like to express ourselves through our gameplay. That meant I had to find a way to include even more than 3-5 advanced cards in the mini game. I needed to give players options to explore different ways to build out their character and their strategy. Non-negotiable.
The cards bulleted above would require 11 of my 18, and I couldn’t figure a way to condense them further (I was already pushing it on font size). So that meant I needed to find a way to fit 20-25 cards into 7.
Well, the first step to this is easy. I’ve done this with most of my micro variants I’ve designed: Make the cards double-sided. Now it’s like we have 14 cards to work with instead of 7. That’s better, but we’re not there yet.
I realized early on that I was going to need to make the hero cards double halved as well as double sided. But this would throw a possibly insurmountable wrench into the mechanics of the game.
The Big Mechanical Wrench
In Mistfall, you often must discard cards to play them. Sometimes you discard multiple cards to power up a single card. So, naturally, you have a discard pile near your hero board where discarded cards are deposited, waiting to be rescued later.
But here’s my favorite (ok, second favorite) mechanism in Mistfall: You also have a buried pile. In Mistfall, your deck is also your hero’s health. When you take damage from an enemy, you must bury a card, placing it in the buried pile. Some cards even have effects powerful enough that they require you to bury the card after resolving its effects. And before you ask, burying cards is indeed worse than discarded cards. Exactly two times worse.
At certain points in the game, you are allowed to rest. Resting means using restoration points to move cards from your buried pile and discard pile back into your deck, so you can use them again. But (and here again is what I love about this whole system), it requires 1 restoration point to move a card from your buried pile to your discard pile, and it requires another restoration point to move a card from your discard pile to your deck.
I think of it as a hole in the ground. When I discard a card, I consider it 1 deep. When I bury a card, well, that’s 2 deep. It’s going to take me 2 restoration points to get that card back later.
But as you can see, my second-favorite mechanism in the game is totally going to mess up my plans. If I have 2 hero cards on each side of each card (one on each half), I’m going to burn through cards way too quickly. Discarding or burying a card takes it out of play temporarily and is going to reduce my available hero cards twice as quickly as in Mistfall.
So one of two things needed to happen. I either needed to rebalance the entire game (enemy health and damage, the number of enemies that come out, etc.) to account for the fact that my hero is weaker due to burning through their deck twice as quickly, or I needed to figure a way to extend the life of their hero cards.
Thus I encountered what I’ll call the Discard Paradox. How do I allow you to discard a card…without actually discarding it? If I could engineer a way to do this, I could make my limited number of hero cards go further, saving me the grunt work of rebalancing the entire game to accommodate my weaker hero.
The Discard Paradox
I landed on a confusing, mind-bending mechanic that saved my game, but upped the complexity. As paradoxes are apt to do.
In Mistsmall, the micro game, you start out with 5 hero cards in you hand (you have two more, but those are gear cards that begin the game equipped and placed on the table). Your hero cards are double-sided, with the basic side on the front and the advanced side on the back.
Every hero card is also double-halved, meaning there’s a top and a bottom half. The terminology of the game is that each side of each card has a Starting half and a Discarded half. This was my method for stretching out the utility of my hero cards, while not eliminating the discarding or burying mechanics.
It works like this: All your cards begin the game with the Starting half active, oriented on top. When you discard Starting cards, you rotate them 180 degrees to the Discarded half and put the card at the bottom of your deck, so you can’t use it again this turn. You have to wait until you draw up your hand again at the end of your turn, when you can potentially use the Discarded half of the card to do stuff.
But here’s the kicker. When you must discard a Discarded card (you read that right), you rotate it back to the Starting half and then put it in your buried pile.
Thus I eliminated the discard pile without eliminating the discard mechanic. My limited number of hero cards play more like 14 than they do 7, but I still maintain that pain of knowing a Discarded card is closer to being buried than a Starting card.
A Niche of a Niche
I knew how small of an audience there would be for Mistsmall when I started the project. Mistfall, the big game, has a cult following, but by no means a large one. It lurks in the shadows of behemoths like Gloomhaven and Mage Knight, games that have somehow broken all conventional wisdom and reached mass appeal. And if not that, at least mass esteem.
I think Mistfall suffered from a few setbacks in its infancy. The rulebook, I have heard, wasn’t very good. It was hard to learn from. And with a complex game, that’s a big problem. (Somehow, notably and mysteriously, Mage Knight has gotten past that hurdle with the same handicap).
From what I’ve read, Mistfall also suffered from a number of typos and cards that needed errata out of the box. This fact, I think, gave the entire project the flavor of the designer and publisher taking it to market before it was ready, and it’s hard for players to get that preconception out of their heads when they sit down to play the game for the first time. I have read online that the game was in truth playtested heavily over a number of years.
In addition to those setbacks, Mistfall was already for a specific type of gamer. Yes, it’s fantasy, which means broad appeal. But it was Euro, heavy, puzzly fantasy. That creates a situation where we’re either asking Euro gamers to embrace a fantasy adventure theme, or we’re asking fantasy adventure gamers to sign up for 2+ hours of a brain-burning optimization puzzle.
All of this to simply say that Mistfall already has a limited player base, albeit a fanatic one. And, to cover this point more quickly, the print and play community is likely even more narrow in scope. So I was essentially designing Mistsmall for the small cross section of people who enjoy Mistsmall (or or at least Euro fantasy more broadly) and are also print and play gamers. A limited user base indeed.
But, like I said, I knew that going in. Mistsmall, for me, achieves exactly what I wanted it to achieve. I get to put Mistfall in my pocket. When I started this process, I was just trying to see where this game would take me. Now that it’s done, my pocket-sized fantasy adventure game is waiting to see where I take it.
You can download Mistsmall here.
Mythfield Games 