Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Stay in Your Lane, Girl

Yesterday I was finally able to throw down a few games of Mephisto: The Card Game. This is a PnP that I backed on Kickstarter earlier this year. Here's the description right from the Kickstarter page:

Mephisto is a 1-4 player dungeon crawling card game where you play as a power hungry adventurer who’s made a deal with the archdemon Mephistopheles. In exchange for unholy strength, you must collect the souls of monsters you defeat in the dungeon. The catch is — you aren’t the only one who’s agreed to this pact, but only one of you will receive the demon’s gift. Race to collect the most souls for Mephisto before time runs out or be doomed to serve the beast for eternity!

In this game you have a 60 card deck of cards. You start with a hand of cards (varying amounts depending on player order) and you use those cards to defeat monsters in the dungeon. The deck consists of four different types of cards: (1) monsters that you battle and gain souls from, (2) weapons that you use to battle the monsters, (3) spells that allow you to boost weapons and gain cards, and (4) items that work basically the same as spells. The difference between spells and items are spells are one time use and items stay in their lane (more on that later). You use the weapons, spells, and items at your disposal to defeat monsters and gain the most souls. That makes you the winner.

Certain cards will also affect your favor with the archdemon, Mephisto. You can spend gained favor to give you extra attacks agains enemies. This is a very useful part of the game that you cannot ignore.

The dungeon is made up of three lanes (columns) of two cards each. I didn't take a picture, so here is a very detailed representation.


Lane 1     Lane 2     Lane 3
_____      _____      _____
|        |      |        |      |        |
|        |      |        |      |        |
|____|      |____|      |____|
_____      _____      _____
|        |      |        |      |        |
|        |      |        |      |        |
|____|      |____|      |____|

When you play weapons or items, they stay in a particular lane. You then use them to attack monsters or manipulate the cards in that lane. Each time you use a weapon/item, you use up some of its durability (note this by turning it clockwise). When it's all used up, it's discarded. You can have no more than 2 weapons/items per lane.

There are four phases on a turn (with a tweaked step for solo play):
(1) Play cards from your hand

(2) Choose one action (loot, attack, or spawn)
(3) Draw a card from the draw pile
(4) Refill empty spaces in the dungeon

Phase One: Playing Cards
For the first portion of your turn, you can play as many cards as possible from your hand. When you play cards from your hand, they may have a play cost. You have to discard that many other cards to use that card. For example, if a spell has a cost of 1, you discard one other card to play it. At this point you would equip items and weapons to lanes and play spells that affect your weapons/items, the dungeon cards, and your favor.

Phase Two: Choose One Action
Loot - choose one card from the dungeon and add it to your hand. You can play it on subsequent turns.

Fight - choose a lane and fight the monsters in that lane using your weapons, items, favor, and any boosts that may have been applied. Any monsters you defeat get tucked close to you because some of them give you bonuses for the rest of the game.

Spawn - gain 1 favor and exchange a monster from your hand with a card from the dungeon.

Phase Three: Draw a Card
Draw one card from the top of the deck and add it to your hand.

Phase Four: Refill Empty Spaces
Any empty spaces in the dungeon get filled from the top of the discard pile. During a regular multiplayer game, any monsters with the exclamation symbol have an immediate effect that takes place.

This is where the solo rules tweak things the most. Before you refill the empty spaces, you draw one card from the top of the deck. If it is a spell or an item, you discard it and the highest cost spell or item from the dungeon. If it is a weapon or monster, you discard the highest attack weapon or monster from the dungeon. This is how they get rid of some of the good/best cards that another player would pick up. After this step, you refill the empty spaces.

So in a solo game, once you hit 16 soul points you immediately stop and count up the remaining cards in the draw pile. The numbers of cards in the pile plus any soul points you have over 16 gives you your final score. The picture at the top shows the score for my first game I ended with 5 points (4 cards, 1 extra point) making me an imp (score of 1-10). 


In game two I almost graduated from being an imp, but I came away with only 10 points (8 cards, 2 extra points). So close, yet still so far.

I backed this game on Kickstarter not really knowing what it was all about, but excited about an inexpensive ($5 for a full colour PnP) dungeon crawler-esque solo game. I really enjoy the art. It's colourful (in real life, not on my hack job copy) and quirky art style is refreshing and humorous. The cards all have lots of cool abilities and you have a lot of choice about how to set up your cards in the different lanes. I'm excited to see how it plays multiplayer as well as get into it more on the solo side. I'm only two games in, so I don't feel like I can make a full on review yet, but I'll get there. I mean, I only have Call to Adventure and Renegade to play more of, plus Unbroken and Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth coming soon... A very excited time for solo gaming, if I had any extra time to actually play these games. Maybe when summer vacation rolls around I can get caught up...

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