Mistfall Review

For the last 40 years—pretty much since Dungeons & Dragons appeared like a wild Snorlax—people have been trying to merge RPGs' imaginative expansiveness with the (relative) simplicity of a board game. Let's be honest: this is a fantasy gamer's El Dorado. Every box festooned with dwarves and elves carries a secret wish to be "the one." And, like a city whose streets are paved with gold, this gaming chimera probably doesn't exist. Not that I'd discourage the attempt, which has spawned scores of excellent games like Descent, Magic Realm and (begrudingly) Lords of Waterdeep. But the more RPG-like you make it, the more you stray from that board game elegance and structure until you reach a point where you might as well be playing D&D.

Mistfall is the latest in this storied tradition (get it?) and a perfect illustration of this Heisenbergian principle. The rulebook is appalling, the proofreading shoddy, the game balance miscalibrated, and the turn structure labyrinthine. But if you can get past all that and sink into your hero's boots of levitation, you'll see the setting and story come to life. What's more, Mistfall hits all 3 RPG pleasure points: leveling, roleplaying, and loot. It is a GM-less, card-driven roleplaying game, warts and all.

Like most RPGs, most of the care has gone into the setting. The Quest Guide, in addition to providing (slightly inaccurate) information about the game's 4 Quests, also gives every hero and villain a full backstory spanning 3-4 chunky paragraphs. Several more pages relate the history of the Valskyrr, an inhospitable, icy frontier plagued by corrupting mists. In this setting, the Mistwalkers—heroes who brave the nefarious influence of the mists in order to discover its secrets and cleanse the land—wage an endless war with the battle-hungry beastmen of the Wildlands; the cultists, slavers and criminals inhabiting the ruined Borderlands; and the mist-raised skeletons and zombies of the Deadlands.

Designer Błażej Kubacki is so devoted to this theme that he's let the obscuring, mesmerizing power of the mists creep into the game itself. The rulebook has no more sense of direction than the trackless wastes of the Valskyrr. It's literally impossible to tell if you are playing the game correctly without consulting outside sources. For instance, the description of the Reinforcements phase in the "Round Structure" section is a 10-part numbered list that contains most of the actual steps of that phase; to get the remaining info, you need to consult the Reinforcement Track description in the Game Tracks section of the Advanced Rules. Other rules are missing entirely and can only be found on the Player Aid cards. Some rules are even contradictory or just baffling: the rules note that "most Quests will provide alternative instructions" for setting up the Rewards deck, but in fact, none of the Quests follow the procedures laid forth in the rulebook, raising the question of what the hell those "general" rules are even for.

Likewise, Mistfall employs an iconographic system that actually slows down the the process of reading the cards. I'm usually pro-iconography: if done well, it can convey a lot of information instantaneously. In Mistfall, though, the icons are buried in cards already saturated with text (reference Magic's Ice Cauldron or Warp World), while some of the most frequent and wordy game effects have no icons at all. Regular Actions, Fast Actions and Reflexes; Discarding, Burying or placing cards on top of your deck all ought to be instantly recognizable, not lost in a sea of tiny type.

So my feelings for Mistfall are complicated. I'm not a roleplayer; my adult attempt to play D&D were squashed under 320 pages of rules covering encumbrance and the precise range of illumination and burn time for a common candle. Mistfall tests my patience in similar ways, but it's also very much the game I've been waiting to play since 2013, when it was called Songs of Artha.

At its heart, it's a series of encounters that occur as your party explores a modular, tile-based landscape. Once you've internalized the rules, these encounters provide some great procedural storytelling. They're keyed to the type of terrain you're in, so you'll usually face beastmen in the Wildlands and skeletons in the Deadlands, but each encounter has a specific tale to tell. You might encounter a beastman hunting party, interrupt a shamanic ritual, or have to fend off slavers armed with paralyzing poisons.

Combating these enemies mostly involves playing cards, either directly from your hand or to your tableau for future activation. Each turn, you get one Regular Action and any number of Free Actions or Reflexes. If this sounds a little familiar, that's because it's basically a more sophisticated take on Sentinels of the Multiverse, with a lot more focus on hand and deck manipulation. A notable feature many cards share is the ability to discard cards with certain keywords, like Combat or Divine, to make actions more powerful, a bit like discarding cards to pay costs in Race for the Galaxy. Meanwhile, your hero deck serves as your life pool, a la Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and you can spend Resolve gained from defeating enemies to learn powerful Advanced Feats, bringing in a deckbuilding element. Nothing here is particularly new, but it's put together in a satisfying package...once you've crested that learning peak.

Once the bad guys are out, another of Mistfall's innovations makes an appearance: the Enemy Focus system. Each hero has an Enemy Focus track that increases each time that hero acts aggressively, such as equipping a sword or resolving an attack. You'll want to keep it low, since passing certain thresholds attracts enemy reinforcements or enrages nearby foes. But you also want to keep it low because enemies, who appear in a neutral Quest Area, are drawn first to the hero with the highest Enemy Focus. Of course, this lowers your Enemy Focus since the other enemies can see the threat's being dealt with, so the next enemy will probably go after somebody else. Mechanically, it's seldom different from saying "divide the enemies evenly among the players," but it sure makes it feel like your pyrotechnic display of arcane magic is drawing zombies to you like flies to honey.

The Arcane Mage is the last hero you want surrounded by enemies, unfortunately. Her character is bewilderingly underpowered: she discards cards like crazy, has poor defense and low recovery (which lets you return discarded cards to the bottom of your deck), and deals piddling damage compared with the melee characters. There's no way she is balanced against the the cleric who, besides the expected healing, is the second-best damage dealer, can chain multiple attacks in one turn, and frequently exploits the three most common enemy vulnerabilities: divine, blunt and fire.

And this is okay, because this is, ultimately, what makes Mistfall a roleplaying game. Given Valskyrr's cosmology, it's almost a necessity that the Dawnbreaker Cleric feel overpowered: it should feel like you are on a fated crusade, smiting the undead with the flames of righteousness, the Goddess shielding you from harm. The Shieldbearer hero, ancestral defender of Frostvalley Keep, likewise feels more than capable of cutting down beasts and beastmen alike. Comparatively, the Arcane Mage is an outsider,; her background story hints that mages are easily corrupted by the mists and that she is "more physically brittle" than the native heroes. She is therefore destined for a supporting role and should resist the urge to use her powers at every opportunity, for this could very likely lead to an early loss.

Mistfall is the fabled RPG-in-a-box, and while that's a mixed blessing, it's still well worth venturing into these maddening mists.