Although you could easily and conceivably swap players in and out, the whole point of a campaign game, for me, is in sharing the experience.

The Cheese System allows players to hoard the crumbs of precious cheese they find on their journey, and use it to bolster their mice with grandiose new abilities and overcome seemingly insurmountable odds. Players read aloud from a storybook and the tiles that make up the board are all built around elements/locations of the story.Each game presents a new chapter in the story driven campaign that has the players battling rats, cockroaches and spiders. This isn’t a “miniatures game,” but the Mice and Mystics miniatures are top quality and rival those found in more traditional miniatures games.

As much as it screams out in its presentation that Mice and Mystics is the family dungeon crawler you’ve been looking for, the reality is that sometimes it plays like someone has sneaked a book on theoretical physics into the children's section of the library but added a fairytale cover. Each mouse has its own unique stats and power, and players will also start out with their own ability cards. It acts as a timer to keep the players moving, it tracks their experience to let a player know when they can level up and it’s used to power special abilities. Later chapters also provide different ways of achieving goals depending on previously earned choices and story achievements and, despite its age, Mice and Mystics still feels like it holds its own in the contemporary market. The rules tell you that you can move to adjacent tiles, but due to the artwork of the boards, movement spaces are not lined up next to each other in a simple grid system (a common staple in dungeon-crawling games).Another similar game, Arcadia Quest, shares much in common with both this game, Descent, and HeroQuest.

N.B: We have had ads in the past and will likely do so again but our editorial space is NOT for sale. There are many situations when players will be facing a certain number of enemies but only have a limited number of miniatures to represent them; or too many enemy cards to fit in the turn tracker that is provided. It’s always great when family games are easy to learn and teach, and that is definitely the case with Mice and Mystics. While the story might not necessarily be for me, as it is written for a much younger audience, I enjoyed the world-building and the characters.Since its release in 2011, the game has been consistently ranked in around Top 350 position of the most popular wargames on BoardGameGeek. When the cheese wheel is full, a surge occurs which advances the Page Marker toward "The End" and launches new enemies whose difficulty is based on how far forward the Page marker has moved. It’s very easy to feel connected to the characters and to feel like you’re *in* this world thanks to the fantastic components and Jerry Hawthorne’s excellent writing. The base game comes with a handful of miniatures, different types of cards, large tiles to build the board, and various tokens.