They will face countless adversaries such as rats, cockroaches, and spiders, and of course the greatest of all horrors: the castle’s housecat, Brodie.

I think that the campaign nature of the game is well done, but I found the actual gameplay grew stale for me too quickly, so I will probably move away from the game without bothering to complete the campaign. The game has modular boards, different on each side, and the further you progress into the story, the more elaborate and interesting the landscape becomes. Yeah, you can lose arms and legs, there are spinning floor blades and pit traps, lootable containers on the board.

However, in Mice and Mystics, you roll the dice so often that it feels like the entire game depends on how those rolls land. The rules are quite simple and straightforward, and the main mechanic of the game – attacking – is incredibly easy to understand. This can create a perplexing puzzle of who should do what and when, leading to high levels of player interaction. While the story might not necessarily be for me, as it is written for a much younger audience, I enjoyed the world-building and the characters.

Together, with the little help of some cleverly appropriated house hold devices, these heroes must save the king and his kingdom! Corny or not, the story is enough to invest you in the characters and cause care for what happens to them. As much as it screams out in its presentation that Mice and Mystics is the family dungeon crawler you’ve been looking for, the reality is that sometimes it plays like someone has sneaked a book on theoretical physics into the children's section of the library but added a fairytale cover. Joining the heroes is Neré, a wild mystic who brings her powerful magic and knowledge of alchemy to the battle.Later chapters also provide different ways of achieving goals depending on previously earned choices and story achievements and, despite its age, Mice and Mystics still feels like it holds its own in the contemporary market. Things like moving through water, falling from one tile to the next, and placement of enemies at the start of the scenario are not detailed enough and are therefore very open to interpretation.

Mice and Mystics is a cooperative adventure game in which the players work together to save an imperiled kingdom.I feel like I spent most of my time fighting the same rats and roaches and it would have been nice to get a bit more variation. And, for the most part the story is interesting - though there are occasionally lines that make me cringe. The next time you reveal an encounter card, place all non-ranged figures on that card in spaces adjacent to the mice.

Why the mice decide they need to fight every household pest is beyond me (ok, ok, they are "heroic" mice - sure), but I really didn't understand why they weren't willing to ever run away. If there is a scamp in the party, remove 2 cheese from this mouse's stash unless this mouse is the scamp. The opponents also use the cheese by adding it to the cheese wheel, which both speeds up the game and brings out more enemies. The face of the clock is used to show wedges of a round cheese that once the sections are completed, will trigger an additional spawn of unwanted creatures. And, I especially appreciate that, if you play like I do, then you must make these decisions from an uninformed perspective - which does a good job of representing the vantage point of your characters.For example; levelling up characters and equipping different items that bolster your character’s abilities. Until this mouse's next turn, all mice on the same space as this mouse count as 2 successed instead of 1 when defending. These are games built around the idea of adventuring, exploring, battling monsters, and usually have some element of story to go with them. The encounter that the mice will face is based on which page space the hourglass marker is on when the encounter is triggered.