by daulnay
We got my son Mice and Mystics for his birthday, and of course played it. We dove in with only a quick read of the rules, and no reading of BGG, so we got more than a few things wrong:1. Rolling for defense only if there's a hit. We always rolled for defense, so our mice got lots of cheese, and the cheese wheel filled up quickly. That pushed us to the end of the chapter way before we got to the courtyard, and is probably the most important thing to get right.
2. Ranged attackers must attack minions/heros in the same space or an adjacent space if there are any. This trumps the 'must attack an un-attacked mouse' rule for minions, allowing Nez to soak up fire from groups of ranged attackers. It also limits Maginos (and Lily).
3. You roll for searches (we found an amazing amount of stuff, until we spotted this rule.)
4. But do not roll for exploration. In a couple places the rules seem to indicate that exploration did not always succeed, and it wasn't clear why so we thought rolling was necessary: "When a mouse is on a space adjacent to an exit area, it can use an explore action to attempt to move to a new tile (p. 12) and "when a mouse successfully performs an explore action to move to a new tile" (italics mine).
The only way we make sense of this is allowing players to explore where the tile edges do not match color, and failing if the tile flip reveals no matching exit area.
5. Some of the scrolls do not state that they are single use (e.g. Levitation). It would have been awfully handy in the sewers, but we decided to limit it to one use.
6. Minions move into a mouse space if possible (we initially only moved them adjacent). This limits mouse movement.
7. Multiple wielding... not clear whether to add both weapon bonuses, or choose between weapons (the latter is correct, with Filch's exception).
8. Our mice were throwing blocks of cheese to each other over several squares, rather than following the limits of the share rules. From now on, we'll huddle together if we want to exchange things.
9. Minions are limited by the figurine mix. We mistakenly faced two spiders (one was a flipped roach figurine) at once! Fortunately, Nez blocked them at a bottleneck and fought one at a time.
10. Ranged and melee minions get placed differently. We split the Elite Rat Warriors from an encounter onto different entry spaces just as we did melee minions. (We also didn't notice that they were ranged attackers, so it balanced out.)
We had a great time, even though we lost!