I had some more to say about Mage Knight, so here we are! :) I'll be moving onto a Top 10 Gaia Project faction list in January, and then I'll be due for a revised Top 10 Solo Games after that. Happy Gaming! Greg
@@SoloPlaythroughs oh ok yea I got the game last week it seems like a cool idea but wasn’t sure how it would balance out. Iv only played 4 solo games so I’m pretty new.
@@slayking2378 Nice! Welcome to Mage Knight. 🙂 I wouldn’t add Volkare’s Camp into Solo Conquest until you’ve played Volkare’s Quest and/or Volkare’s Return a few times. Beating Volkare can require a pretty different approach at times. 🙂
Although I did not played a lot of these, listening to this (and others during play throughs) of your analysis is always informative and inspirational for me setting up another MK session. Thanks!
This is wonderful! I love this game but have honestly only ever played solo conquest. I didn't even realize some of these were in the game 😳 they're all in ultimate edition?
Yep! You are going to want to check out the various scenario sections. Note that the rules for Solo Conquest Blitz are fuzzy as written, but you can find a couple different files for solo scenario set ups on BGG - there are really two accepted ways to play that one.
Just found your channel... loving the Mage Knight content. Long time MK player, but I never really explored much more beyond conquest Blitz and the new Relic scenario. Looking forward to trying Dungeon Lord.
Thanks for the comment, Guillaume! I pretty much only played Conquest and the two Lost Legion scenarios for a long time. Working on this channel encouraged me to branch out a bit and I am so glad I did. Good luck! 🙂
Great list! My top five (includes a fantastic fan-made scenario) would be 1) Solo Conquest 2) Volkare’s Return 3) Life & Death 4) Quest for the Golden Grail 5) Volkare’s Quest.
You're welcome! And good timing. :) I'd generally recommend going Lost Legion before Tezla but there's really no wrong way to go about it here. Good luck exploring the rest of the game!
Excellent Greg. Can we get a MK vs Spirit Island review sometime? MK its by far my favourite game and I would love to see what made SI better for you. Cheers!
Hey, Matias! Thanks for the comment and that's a great suggestion for a video in the future. :) For now, I'm happy to give you a few quick thoughts. For starters, if I only was only going to play exactly one game of one game, I would choose to play Mage Knight, as Mage Knight delivers on a game-to-game basis in a way that Spirit Island doesn't match. But, when it comes to evaluating the game as a whole with many plays in mind, Spirit Island just literally and figuratively brings more to the table. Spirit Island has 24 wildly assymetrical spirits and 7 wildly different adversaries, each with 7 levels of difficulty to play against, plus there are multiple scenarios and two sides to each player board. Beyond the variability in content, Spirit Island's theme and narrative are far more compelling than Mage Knight's generic fantasy setting with ambiguous character motivations. In the end, both games are masterpieces in game design and I'd even give the slight edge to Mage Knight when it comes to mechanics. But Spirit Island will likely remain my #1 for a long time to come.
I agree with you on Tezla, a lot of the new cards, monsters and scenarios have been obviously designed by someone else (which is true). You can tell from the card effects for example that they are super wild and less tight than base or LL. That being said Tezla brings interesting mechanics into the game and I haven't played those scenarios yet but after watching your vid I know want to try them haha!
Hey Fire! Thanks for the comment. Just to clarify, Tezla has no new cards but I agree that the enemies are a bit more rough around the edges than those in the base game and LL. (You might be thinking about the dual-colored cards that came with the Ultimate Edition, and I would agree that they also seem a bit "looser" than the rest of the content.) That said, I do think it's worth playing the Tezla scenarios and seeing if you like them, especially Life and Death. Thanks again!
I really like the different focus that the different scenarios set, e.g. scenarios that are not about conquering cities. You are right, the Mines Liberation feels so tough that on my first playthrough I just did last weekend, I was kind of sure that when playing the special scenarios solo that you always have 3 days and 3 night....which I seem to have misinterpreted from the rules "when playing scenarios solo". I managed to rather easily conquer the last mine in the third night, BUT I hardly did anything else than running from mine to mine. And depending on the starting tiles and where exactly the mines appear, the scenario can be hard in two ways with no influence on it: a) no mine to conquer in the first day which means no probably two level increases b) needing to run long ways because mines are on the edge of the map Nevertheless, I feel like I like the game much more when it comes to beating your own score than needing to rush minimalistic to even achieve the target. That's why I had a blast with the Mines Liberation in 3+3. I know it's a hybrid of eurogame and adventure/thematic game but when you really need to rush with no looking left or right, then to me it can be too much of a euro-puzzle instead of having an epic fantasy-game.
Great video. I feel there is a lot of awesome fan made content out there for this game. A proper campaign is the one thing i feel this game is lacking. I have been testing a scenario involving all of laberynth conquering, i feel these are underused in general
Hey, PDV! Yeah, I am increasingly interested in the fanmade content for MK, but I just haven't spent the time to really try any of it yet. I wonder what a different publisher would have been able to do with this game, as WizKids really seems to be missing a lot of opportunity here. A scenario built around the labyrinths is super interesting!
Kind of surprised you did not put conquest blitz higher, but i understand your reasoning. I also prefer return to quest from the LL scenarios, somehow it semms to “go wrong the right way” more often in that. And where are the druids?!
I can see people preferring Return over Quest for sure. I have definitely had more epic feeling games of Return - I just find that Quest more consistently delivers for me. As for Druid Nights, from what I know, it doesn't play well for solo play unless you like chasing a high score. But let me know if I'm missing something!
Huh, we are very similar. Totally agree on Realm of the Dead, I really dislike that one… punishing with not much fun. We also have the same top 2, although I would swap them round, cheers 🙂👍🏻
Fun video and I always enjoy your Mage Knight musings. However, I wonder how your opinions of the scenarios are affected by the fact that you ignore scoring. Aren't the scenarios supposed to evaluate how well you optimized by your score at the end? And since you intentionally ignore that part of the design, since you instead just apply a binary "did I win or not?" as a measure of how well you did, I wonder how much you're missing in terms of the scenario tuning. In other words, I wonder how differently the scenarios would be ranked by someone who's playing them as they were designed instead of someone who has essentially house-ruled his own victory conditions. Maybe not at all, but I was hoping you might address that in your discussion. Anyway, as usual, keep up the great work, Greg.
Hey, Tom! Thanks for this thoughtful comment. I do agree that my lack of interest in scoring does affect my rankings, especially considering a scenario like Druid Nights never had a chance of making my Top 10 since it relies more on scoring than a win condition. That said, I will push back on the idea that my approach to Mage Knight is anything like a "house rule". In most of the scenarios, the game itself uses the concept of victory related to to the win condition before it even gets to scoring. Yes, there is something to be said about the challenge of optimization, but how much you could optimize your score would be somewhat dependant on what Mage you were playing, what adventure sites you had access to in your game, and what cities/enemies you encounter. In this sense, scoring in this game feels at least somewhat arbitrary - perhaps not as arbitrary as it is with Spirit Island but, IMO, almost equally extraneous to the actual experience of the game. Related to this, I have a hard time agreeing with the idea that my lack of scoring means that I'm not playing the game "as designed". With rare exceptions (i.e., the recent Wolfhawk live playthrough in which I just took a bunch of wounds and rested knowing I had a Motivation skill instead of avoiding being knocked out), do you really think my play of the game would change all the much if I actually cared about scoring? I'm willing to say with a fairly high level of confidence that, in my most successful games, I end the game with just as few wounds and just as many strong artifacts/spells/advanced actions as most anyone else successfully playing at the levels I play.
@@SoloPlaythroughs That's a great question, Greg -- would you play any differently if you didn't ignore scoring? -- but I'm not familiar enough with Mage Knight to know the answer. I will gladly defer to your claim that you wouldn't play any differently. But isn't that beside the point? Because with scoring, regardless of HOW you played, different games would have different degrees of success beyond your binary "did I win or not?" criteria. For instance, let's consider two hypothetical games. Game A and game B. You won both, but according to scoring, game A was more successful because you scored 50 points, and game B was less successful because you scored 40 points. You won both games, sure, but according to the relative weights of those two optimizations, according to the criteria Chvatil has provided with his scoring system, the design favors playthrough A. You say this is arbitrary, but how is it any more arbitrary than *any* of the rules? Take the time limits, for example, which vary dramatically from scenario to scenario. Why do you take issue with scoring being arbitrary, but not the time limits? Yet you wouldn't dream of ignoring the time limits any more than you'd ignore hand size or a monster's stats. But even if scoring seems arbitrary, it's certainly not random. You can see what scoring is doing by the relative weight it applies to different elements of the game. They aren't just random numbers thrown at you. They're a measure of how well you did, with disproportionate weight put on things like how quickly you conquered a city. A game in which you conquered it earlier means you did better, according to the scoring. But when you play, Greg, it doesn't matter *when* you conquered the city, only *whether* you conquered it. And that's not how Chvatil designed the game. He wants to challenge you by pushing you to conquer the city sooner. That's the whole point of Mage Knight! It's a timed optimization puzzle. If I can just take as much time as I want, it will be trivially easy to conquer four megalopolises. But the game is designed specifically around the idea that sooner means better. Or consider how wounds are part of scoring. It's not arbitrary; rather, it's part of the balancing. You've often discussed your preferences for which cities are the toughest, and that's colored by the fact that you ignore scoring and don't care how many wounds are added to your deck on the last city. Both of these facets of your playthroughs -- not caring when you conquer a city and not caring how many wounds are in your deck at the end of the game -- are counter to how Chvatil designed the game. These are elements that he ties into scoring, and without scoring they simply don't exist. You can take a city with your last card on the last night, and you can have 20 wounds in your deck. But if I took a city two days earlier and I only have 10 wounds in my deck, it makes no difference if you're ignoring scoring. We both did equally well. We both get the same gold star. So I would push back against you pushing back when I say you're not playing the game as designed. :) He made a game that pushes you to get better at optimizing, partly by rating your optimization after the fact. If you don't take part in that rating, if you only ever push one variable (the difficulty level) without taking into account the commensurate variable (the scoring), you're not solving the full formula that Vlaada Chvatil has posed. You're not playing the game as he designed it. You're doing an amazing job on the first variable -- I am continually in awe of how coolly you get through situations utterly beyond my abilities, when I would have just flipped the table -- and you're opting out completely when it comes to the second variable. In fact, I suspect if I knew Mage Knight better, I would be able to see how ignoring scoring is actually a key part of why you do so well. Would you be able to be so aggressive if you were taking into account what it does to your score? And as someone who does care about scoring, am I learning the wrong lessons from watching you play? Perhaps. You're still doing an amazing job as a teacher and entertainer, but I wonder if I should be careful about taking some of your lessons to heart. :) Anyway, I didn't mean to turn this into a discussion of scoring, since I know how you feel about it. And I apologize for the wall of text. I'm honestly not trying to drag you into a tit-for-tat throwdown, but I can get carried away when I'm trying to articulate something! My main point is simply that I wonder whether the discussion of scenarios might be different if you were using scoring instead of a binary "did I win?" criteria. It sounds like it wouldn't be that different, but pro-scoring folks like me might still kick up a ruckus anyway. :)
Tom, I think you are dramatically overestimating the difference scoring makes in gameplay. I might be a little more reluctant to take wounds but the truth is a player's score is going to be significantly lower if they don't actually accomplish the victory conditions of a given scenario...and learning how/when to take wounds can be an important part of learning how to regularly accomplish victory conditions. And, of course, I'm trying to accomplish the victory conditions as soon as possible...but, frankly, playing at the levels I do, that generally means doing it in the last turn or two of the game anyway. In this context, comparing post-game scoring to in-game time limits is truly comparing apples to oranges. Yes, could I put out a series in which I play at the recommended 5-8 city levels and just do everything I can to min-max my score, including taking the extra turn after the victory condition is met. But, honestly, that doesn't interest me and it would make for longer and less entertaining playthroughs. As I see it, the scoring system seems primarily designed to support the competitive play of the game, with the added benefits of providing cooperative players who like scoring a way to compare their relative success and solo players who like scoring a way to track progress. There are games in which scoring is central to a level of victory (e.g., Pavlov's House) but, in most scenarios, Mage Knight explicitly tells you whether you won or lost separate from the question of scoring. It just feels a bit offbase to say that I'm not "solving the full formula...posed" because I don't take 10 minutes after every game to calculate a number that no one (including me) will remember.
@@SoloPlaythroughs All fair points, and I apologize if I'm coming across more combative than I intended. But I want to reiterate that my main point isn't that scoring would make a difference in how you play! You would know this much better than I! I'm simply saying that you're ignoring one of several ways Chvatil has tuned his game. In other words, there's more to Mage Knight than simply winning or losing. There are degrees of winning and losing, and for novices like me, those degrees are a helpful part of the design. Also, ten minutes? Really? Now who's dramatically overestimating scoring? :)
I don’t find you combative at all - at least not in the truest sense. I just want to be sure that anybody who stumbles into these comments doesn’t get the impression that I’m playing my own “houseruled” version of Mage Knight. As for 10 minutes, I don’t know if that estimate is that unreasonable by the time you consider playing another turn, having to break down your deck, and having to do the math. To your point though, perhaps 5 would be more accurate in most games, depending on how much time it would take for me to min-max that last turn. 🙂
Nooo why solo conquest #2??? Outrage! My personal faves: 1) Solo Conquest 2) Volkare's return (I actually like the randomness, really makes the game more alive) 3) Life and Death!
I had some more to say about Mage Knight, so here we are! :) I'll be moving onto a Top 10 Gaia Project faction list in January, and then I'll be due for a revised Top 10 Solo Games after that. Happy Gaming! Greg
Do you ever play solo conquest with Volks camp in the city hex pile and if so what do you think about it?
@@slayking2378 I do and I like the variety. But it will definitely lower your win rate. 🙂
@@SoloPlaythroughs oh ok yea I got the game last week it seems like a cool idea but wasn’t sure how it would balance out. Iv only played 4 solo games so I’m pretty new.
@@slayking2378 Nice! Welcome to Mage Knight. 🙂 I wouldn’t add Volkare’s Camp into Solo Conquest until you’ve played Volkare’s Quest and/or Volkare’s Return a few times. Beating Volkare can require a pretty different approach at times. 🙂
@@SoloPlaythroughs You should do more mage knight top tens like top 10 unique cards and skills would be good content.
Although I did not played a lot of these, listening to this (and others during play throughs) of your analysis is always informative and inspirational for me setting up another MK session. Thanks!
Thanks for the comment, Stefan! Hopefully you get a chance to play all of these scenarios at some point soon! :)
This is wonderful! I love this game but have honestly only ever played solo conquest. I didn't even realize some of these were in the game 😳 they're all in ultimate edition?
Yep! You are going to want to check out the various scenario sections. Note that the rules for Solo Conquest Blitz are fuzzy as written, but you can find a couple different files for solo scenario set ups on BGG - there are really two accepted ways to play that one.
Just found your channel... loving the Mage Knight content. Long time MK player, but I never really explored much more beyond conquest Blitz and the new Relic scenario. Looking forward to trying Dungeon Lord.
Thanks for the comment, Guillaume! I pretty much only played Conquest and the two Lost Legion scenarios for a long time. Working on this channel encouraged me to branch out a bit and I am so glad I did. Good luck! 🙂
Great list! My top five (includes a fantastic fan-made scenario) would be 1) Solo Conquest 2) Volkare’s Return 3) Life & Death 4) Quest for the Golden Grail 5) Volkare’s Quest.
Thanks, Johnathan! I haven't delved into the fanmade content world yet, but perhaps I need to change that one day soon. Thanks for sharing your Top 5!
Thanks for this; I was actually searching a few days ago for MK scenario rankings as I'm starting to branch out from solo conquest
You're welcome! And good timing. :) I'd generally recommend going Lost Legion before Tezla but there's really no wrong way to go about it here. Good luck exploring the rest of the game!
Is dungeon lords scenario part of shades of Tezla?
Hey Prashanth! Great question - the answer is no. Dungeon Lords and Mines Liberation are both found in the rules for the base game.
Thanks! I've only played first recon.. yet to read the full scenario book. Will check them out after playing first recon with all heros :)
@@prash11leo Awesome - welcome to Atlantis and good luck slaying some enemies! 🙂
Excellent Greg. Can we get a MK vs Spirit Island review sometime? MK its by far my favourite game and I would love to see what made SI better for you. Cheers!
Hey, Matias! Thanks for the comment and that's a great suggestion for a video in the future. :) For now, I'm happy to give you a few quick thoughts. For starters, if I only was only going to play exactly one game of one game, I would choose to play Mage Knight, as Mage Knight delivers on a game-to-game basis in a way that Spirit Island doesn't match. But, when it comes to evaluating the game as a whole with many plays in mind, Spirit Island just literally and figuratively brings more to the table. Spirit Island has 24 wildly assymetrical spirits and 7 wildly different adversaries, each with 7 levels of difficulty to play against, plus there are multiple scenarios and two sides to each player board. Beyond the variability in content, Spirit Island's theme and narrative are far more compelling than Mage Knight's generic fantasy setting with ambiguous character motivations. In the end, both games are masterpieces in game design and I'd even give the slight edge to Mage Knight when it comes to mechanics. But Spirit Island will likely remain my #1 for a long time to come.
I agree with you on Tezla, a lot of the new cards, monsters and scenarios have been obviously designed by someone else (which is true). You can tell from the card effects for example that they are super wild and less tight than base or LL. That being said Tezla brings interesting mechanics into the game and I haven't played those scenarios yet but after watching your vid I know want to try them haha!
Hey Fire! Thanks for the comment. Just to clarify, Tezla has no new cards but I agree that the enemies are a bit more rough around the edges than those in the base game and LL. (You might be thinking about the dual-colored cards that came with the Ultimate Edition, and I would agree that they also seem a bit "looser" than the rest of the content.) That said, I do think it's worth playing the Tezla scenarios and seeing if you like them, especially Life and Death. Thanks again!
@@SoloPlaythroughs Oh yeah, I meant the cards coming from the expansions not designed by Vlaada :)
I really like the different focus that the different scenarios set, e.g. scenarios that are not about conquering cities.
You are right, the Mines Liberation feels so tough that on my first playthrough I just did last weekend, I was kind of sure that when playing the special scenarios solo that you always have 3 days and 3 night....which I seem to have misinterpreted from the rules "when playing scenarios solo".
I managed to rather easily conquer the last mine in the third night, BUT I hardly did anything else than running from mine to mine.
And depending on the starting tiles and where exactly the mines appear, the scenario can be hard in two ways with no influence on it:
a) no mine to conquer in the first day which means no probably two level increases
b) needing to run long ways because mines are on the edge of the map
Nevertheless, I feel like I like the game much more when it comes to beating your own score than needing to rush minimalistic to even achieve the target.
That's why I had a blast with the Mines Liberation in 3+3.
I know it's a hybrid of eurogame and adventure/thematic game but when you really need to rush with no looking left or right, then to me it can be too much of a euro-puzzle instead of having an epic fantasy-game.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about Mines Lib, Andre! The 5 rounds is so rough!
32:10 stories? which kind of stories? ha. ;)
Legends and fables I say! 🤣
I think you are really ready to create your own scenario!
I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I'll leave the game design to the professionals! :)
Great video. I feel there is a lot of awesome fan made content out there for this game. A proper campaign is the one thing i feel this game is lacking. I have been testing a scenario involving all of laberynth conquering, i feel these are underused in general
Hey, PDV! Yeah, I am increasingly interested in the fanmade content for MK, but I just haven't spent the time to really try any of it yet. I wonder what a different publisher would have been able to do with this game, as WizKids really seems to be missing a lot of opportunity here. A scenario built around the labyrinths is super interesting!
@@SoloPlaythroughs I tried a fanmade scenario called war of four, a bit unpolished but the idea of combining everything was a cool change of pace
Sounds cool!
Kind of surprised you did not put conquest blitz higher, but i understand your reasoning. I also prefer return to quest from the LL scenarios, somehow it semms to “go wrong the right way” more often in that. And where are the druids?!
I can see people preferring Return over Quest for sure. I have definitely had more epic feeling games of Return - I just find that Quest more consistently delivers for me. As for Druid Nights, from what I know, it doesn't play well for solo play unless you like chasing a high score. But let me know if I'm missing something!
Huh, we are very similar. Totally agree on Realm of the Dead, I really dislike that one… punishing with not much fun. We also have the same top 2, although I would swap them round, cheers 🙂👍🏻
Quest and Conquest are both just so good!
6:20 I believe Mr Centaur is still mad about the last time he was named incorrectly, and now, this. Srsly
Ha! I forgot that this isn't the first time that I confused my "taurs"...
Fun video and I always enjoy your Mage Knight musings. However, I wonder how your opinions of the scenarios are affected by the fact that you ignore scoring. Aren't the scenarios supposed to evaluate how well you optimized by your score at the end? And since you intentionally ignore that part of the design, since you instead just apply a binary "did I win or not?" as a measure of how well you did, I wonder how much you're missing in terms of the scenario tuning.
In other words, I wonder how differently the scenarios would be ranked by someone who's playing them as they were designed instead of someone who has essentially house-ruled his own victory conditions. Maybe not at all, but I was hoping you might address that in your discussion.
Anyway, as usual, keep up the great work, Greg.
Hey, Tom! Thanks for this thoughtful comment. I do agree that my lack of interest in scoring does affect my rankings, especially considering a scenario like Druid Nights never had a chance of making my Top 10 since it relies more on scoring than a win condition. That said, I will push back on the idea that my approach to Mage Knight is anything like a "house rule". In most of the scenarios, the game itself uses the concept of victory related to to the win condition before it even gets to scoring. Yes, there is something to be said about the challenge of optimization, but how much you could optimize your score would be somewhat dependant on what Mage you were playing, what adventure sites you had access to in your game, and what cities/enemies you encounter. In this sense, scoring in this game feels at least somewhat arbitrary - perhaps not as arbitrary as it is with Spirit Island but, IMO, almost equally extraneous to the actual experience of the game. Related to this, I have a hard time agreeing with the idea that my lack of scoring means that I'm not playing the game "as designed". With rare exceptions (i.e., the recent Wolfhawk live playthrough in which I just took a bunch of wounds and rested knowing I had a Motivation skill instead of avoiding being knocked out), do you really think my play of the game would change all the much if I actually cared about scoring? I'm willing to say with a fairly high level of confidence that, in my most successful games, I end the game with just as few wounds and just as many strong artifacts/spells/advanced actions as most anyone else successfully playing at the levels I play.
@@SoloPlaythroughs That's a great question, Greg -- would you play any differently if you didn't ignore scoring? -- but I'm not familiar enough with Mage Knight to know the answer. I will gladly defer to your claim that you wouldn't play any differently. But isn't that beside the point? Because with scoring, regardless of HOW you played, different games would have different degrees of success beyond your binary "did I win or not?" criteria.
For instance, let's consider two hypothetical games. Game A and game B. You won both, but according to scoring, game A was more successful because you scored 50 points, and game B was less successful because you scored 40 points. You won both games, sure, but according to the relative weights of those two optimizations, according to the criteria Chvatil has provided with his scoring system, the design favors playthrough A. You say this is arbitrary, but how is it any more arbitrary than *any* of the rules? Take the time limits, for example, which vary dramatically from scenario to scenario. Why do you take issue with scoring being arbitrary, but not the time limits? Yet you wouldn't dream of ignoring the time limits any more than you'd ignore hand size or a monster's stats.
But even if scoring seems arbitrary, it's certainly not random. You can see what scoring is doing by the relative weight it applies to different elements of the game. They aren't just random numbers thrown at you. They're a measure of how well you did, with disproportionate weight put on things like how quickly you conquered a city. A game in which you conquered it earlier means you did better, according to the scoring. But when you play, Greg, it doesn't matter *when* you conquered the city, only *whether* you conquered it. And that's not how Chvatil designed the game. He wants to challenge you by pushing you to conquer the city sooner. That's the whole point of Mage Knight! It's a timed optimization puzzle. If I can just take as much time as I want, it will be trivially easy to conquer four megalopolises. But the game is designed specifically around the idea that sooner means better.
Or consider how wounds are part of scoring. It's not arbitrary; rather, it's part of the balancing. You've often discussed your preferences for which cities are the toughest, and that's colored by the fact that you ignore scoring and don't care how many wounds are added to your deck on the last city. Both of these facets of your playthroughs -- not caring when you conquer a city and not caring how many wounds are in your deck at the end of the game -- are counter to how Chvatil designed the game. These are elements that he ties into scoring, and without scoring they simply don't exist. You can take a city with your last card on the last night, and you can have 20 wounds in your deck. But if I took a city two days earlier and I only have 10 wounds in my deck, it makes no difference if you're ignoring scoring. We both did equally well. We both get the same gold star.
So I would push back against you pushing back when I say you're not playing the game as designed. :) He made a game that pushes you to get better at optimizing, partly by rating your optimization after the fact. If you don't take part in that rating, if you only ever push one variable (the difficulty level) without taking into account the commensurate variable (the scoring), you're not solving the full formula that Vlaada Chvatil has posed. You're not playing the game as he designed it. You're doing an amazing job on the first variable -- I am continually in awe of how coolly you get through situations utterly beyond my abilities, when I would have just flipped the table -- and you're opting out completely when it comes to the second variable. In fact, I suspect if I knew Mage Knight better, I would be able to see how ignoring scoring is actually a key part of why you do so well. Would you be able to be so aggressive if you were taking into account what it does to your score? And as someone who does care about scoring, am I learning the wrong lessons from watching you play? Perhaps. You're still doing an amazing job as a teacher and entertainer, but I wonder if I should be careful about taking some of your lessons to heart. :)
Anyway, I didn't mean to turn this into a discussion of scoring, since I know how you feel about it. And I apologize for the wall of text. I'm honestly not trying to drag you into a tit-for-tat throwdown, but I can get carried away when I'm trying to articulate something! My main point is simply that I wonder whether the discussion of scenarios might be different if you were using scoring instead of a binary "did I win?" criteria. It sounds like it wouldn't be that different, but pro-scoring folks like me might still kick up a ruckus anyway. :)
Tom, I think you are dramatically overestimating the difference scoring makes in gameplay. I might be a little more reluctant to take wounds but the truth is a player's score is going to be significantly lower if they don't actually accomplish the victory conditions of a given scenario...and learning how/when to take wounds can be an important part of learning how to regularly accomplish victory conditions. And, of course, I'm trying to accomplish the victory conditions as soon as possible...but, frankly, playing at the levels I do, that generally means doing it in the last turn or two of the game anyway. In this context, comparing post-game scoring to in-game time limits is truly comparing apples to oranges. Yes, could I put out a series in which I play at the recommended 5-8 city levels and just do everything I can to min-max my score, including taking the extra turn after the victory condition is met. But, honestly, that doesn't interest me and it would make for longer and less entertaining playthroughs. As I see it, the scoring system seems primarily designed to support the competitive play of the game, with the added benefits of providing cooperative players who like scoring a way to compare their relative success and solo players who like scoring a way to track progress. There are games in which scoring is central to a level of victory (e.g., Pavlov's House) but, in most scenarios, Mage Knight explicitly tells you whether you won or lost separate from the question of scoring. It just feels a bit offbase to say that I'm not "solving the full formula...posed" because I don't take 10 minutes after every game to calculate a number that no one (including me) will remember.
@@SoloPlaythroughs All fair points, and I apologize if I'm coming across more combative than I intended. But I want to reiterate that my main point isn't that scoring would make a difference in how you play! You would know this much better than I! I'm simply saying that you're ignoring one of several ways Chvatil has tuned his game.
In other words, there's more to Mage Knight than simply winning or losing. There are degrees of winning and losing, and for novices like me, those degrees are a helpful part of the design.
Also, ten minutes? Really? Now who's dramatically overestimating scoring? :)
I don’t find you combative at all - at least not in the truest sense. I just want to be sure that anybody who stumbles into these comments doesn’t get the impression that I’m playing my own “houseruled” version of Mage Knight. As for 10 minutes, I don’t know if that estimate is that unreasonable by the time you consider playing another turn, having to break down your deck, and having to do the math. To your point though, perhaps 5 would be more accurate in most games, depending on how much time it would take for me to min-max that last turn. 🙂
Nooo why solo conquest #2??? Outrage!
My personal faves:
1) Solo Conquest
2) Volkare's return (I actually like the randomness, really makes the game more alive)
3) Life and Death!
Hey, Fkellog! Hard to argue with those three! Quest v Return is definitely a big time personal preference thing. And my top 2 are REALLY close. 🙂
I thought you were going to say…this is the first time you had 10 games on a top10 list…
Nah - been there, done that! :)