Mage Knight

Overall score:

Mage Knight has been out for two years now, and yet I only discovered it a few weeks ago. How did I manage to make weekly visits to game stores and not know anything about it? I have no idea. Once I figured out what was going on, however, I was fascinated—it quickly joined the elite ranks of games I actually spend money on, and that is a rare honor. Mage Knight is fun to play, easy to learn, and cheap to buy. It’s simple enough that neophytes could learn it all in 20 minutes or less, but strategic enough to satisfy hardened wargamers. It’s tactical, enjoyable, and collectible. Simply put, Mage Knight is the most exciting game since Magic: The Gathering invented CCGs.

Mage Knight is a tabletop wargame using small plastic miniatures, a tape measure, and dice. You set up simple terrain (most of my early games utilized a deck of cards in place of a wall and a pop bottle in place of a tower), set out your units, and play. The rules are flexible enough to allow for almost any scale—you could play a small skirmish with two or three guys per team, anywhere up to a massive battle with large troop formations. In this it is similar to most wargames, and you’re probably asking what makes Mage Knight so special. Well, consider for a moment the typical problems that wargames carry with them—they’re expensive to buy, they take an enormous amount of time and effort to assemble and paint, the rules are long and complex, and the games move pretty slowly. What makes Mage Knight special is that it doesn’t have any of these problems.

When you buy most wargame figures they come unassembled and unpainted—not so with Mage Knight. Your figures are ready to go as soon as you open the box, each one mounted on the cleverest little idea I’ve heard in years: the combat dial. The base of each figure is actually a dial, with a little window that shows the figure’s stats (speed, attack, defense, and damage). When a figure is hit and takes damage, you move the dial that many clicks to the left—as you take damage and click the dial, the numbers get lower to represent combat fatigue and injury. When you click far enough that the numbers are replaced by little skulls, the figure is dead.

You want to know how many inches you can move? Look at the current speed number and move that many inches. You want to attack another figure? Just roll two dice, add you attack number, and compare the result to the target’s defense—if you equalled or beat it, you hit. Want to know how much damage you do? Look at the damage number and click the targets dial that many times. There—I just taught you how to play.

Is there anything else you want to know about a figure? It’s all the dial: rarity, power level, name, faction, and even points value are all right there in front of you—there’s literally no need for rulebooks or charts. If a figure can shoot it lists a range and quantity on the dial. The only thing not on the dial are the ability descriptions—the dial is marked with colors that show which powers a figure has, but the powers themselves are listed on a reference card. After a couple of games, however, we found that we rarely ever checked the card—we knew what the powers did and what the different colors meant, so we could leave the reference material aside and get down to playing.

People who know me know that I love a game that’s self-contained—there’s an elegance to a game that can be played solely on its own terms, without regard for complex extras. In that sense, Mage Knight is practically unparalleled. I spent last week camping in Yellowstone, and took the Mage Knight stuff—around 40 figures and all the booklets and maps—in a little tupperware box about ten inches square. Whenever we got a spare moment (the babies were asleep and we were too tired to go hiking) we whipped out the box and played a little game right there in camp. Try doing that with any other wargame. Since the points values are right there on the dial, the game takes about five minutes to set up—choose your guys, lay out some terrain, and go for it. The game itself will take anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes, depending on size, making it fast-paced, mobile, and perfect for playing on the go or in quick moments.

The only exception to Mage Knight’s exceptional system of compact play is the need for counters, though I don’t really see that as a downside—when you buy the game, give the clerk a quarter and ask for change in pennies, and you’ll have all the counters you’ll ever need. The counters represent the actions a figure takes—every turn you get a certain number of actions, which include everything from moving and attacking to using special abilities. When you "give a figure an action," such as moving it or casting a spell, you mark it with a counter; each figure can take only one action per turn, and a figure who takes two actions in a row takes a click of damage (known as "pushing"). At the end of your turn, you remove the action counters from every figure who didn’t take an action that turn—they can act next turn without any "pushing" damage.

It sounds kind of weird, and it takes a little getting used to, but the flow of actions is one of the keys to successful Mage Knight strategy—you have to know when to move the right people, when to charge and when to hang back, and when to push your figures to gain an advantage. Charging is particularly tricky—in most cases, a figure that gets charged will attack before the figure that charged him, so you have to think carefully. Is it better to charge now or wait until he charges you? What if you charge a figure that already has an action counter—will he push and attack you first, or will he wait and allow you to push and get in the first hit? Maybe attacking first isn’t even an issue—if you’re tough enough, you can survive a few clicks of damage without losing any combat effectiveness, and there’s always the chance that your high defense will keep you from being hit at all. As simple as they are, the rules provide you with plenty of these strategic choices, which make the game both exciting and demanding.

Now let’s talk about the figures—the one blemish on an otherwise perfect game. They’re not as well-sculpted or as detailed as, Warhammer figures, but that’s forgivable—they’re half the price or less, plus you’re presumably buying them for a different purpose. Warhammer is 90% hobby and only 10% game—you buy the figures because you want to put in the work of modelling and painting and have something that is your own to show for it. A well-painted Warhammer model is a display piece, and an entire army is an impressive accomplishment. Mage Knight doesn’t try to compete with that because there’s no point—Mage Knight models are larger, more durable, and far closer to action figures than showcase miniatures. So the quality of the figures I can overlook, but the quality of the packing is occasionally lacking—many of my figures were bent or deformed when I popped them out of their little plastic mold in the box.

Worse still, and not nearly as forgivable, is the low quality of painting on some of them. I understand that they’re mass-produced, and some of them are surprisingly good when you consider that, but most of them are unexciting and some are downright horrible. It may be that I got a bad batch, or it may be that I’m looking at them with too critical a figure-painter’s eye; in the middle of an exciting game, you don’t usually notice that the metal-colored paint slopped all over the dwarf’s arm, or that the elf’s hair seems to be taking over his shirt. Still, considering how good some of them are, and considering the difference in quality from one set to another (the current base set, called Unlimited, is much better painted than Sinister, the most recent expansion), it’s obvious that much of it is a process problem rather than an overall fact of life. They could definitely make a better effort to improve the painting.

As interesting as the game is, the marketing strategy is downright fascinating. Mage Knight is packaged and sold like a CCG—you buy starter packs (ten random figures plus the rules and dice and tape measure) and booster packs (four or five random figures, depending on which set you buy). The figures in each pack are randomized and of varying rarity, just like CCG cards, which changes the way most wargamers buy their figures. If you want to collect an undead army, for example, you can’t just go out and buy a box of undead guys—you have no idea what you’re going to get, so you have to be a little more flexible and play your best stuff rather than use a haphazard collection of inferior undead. This method does have it’s benefits, however, because it makes the figures collectible—the game has been out long enough that most game stores are bustling Mage Knight centers, and you’re likely to find someone who’ll trade with you.

In conclusion, buy this game. Wargamers will find in it plenty of strategy and new opportunities to challenge them, and people who have never played a wargame in their lives will get into it very quickly and easily. The day I find a tabletop game that’s both as simple and as deep, I’ll eat every hat I can find.

Written by Fellfrosch on July 25th, 2002