Review: Myth

One of last year's (and rolling over into this year's) most anticipated Kickstarter boardgames was Myth, by Megacon Games, the same folks who make Mercs.

Myth is a fully cooperative dungeon crawler. It has many unique gameplay features that set it apart from Descent, Super Dungeon Explore, and other popular games in the genre. There's no effective turns - just cycles of players taking actions with the AI interjecting every so often. Actions are driving by the cards in your deck, and most of them can play off of one another to create some pretty cool abilities.

My copy arrived a little over a week ago. For the purposes of this article, we're just going to look at what ships with the retail copy of the game, discounted all the Kickstarter extras.

All the loot in the box

You get several board tiles of very nice quality. They have a unique matt finish on them as well. The punchout tokens came out with very little trouble. There's tons of cards for both heroes, monsters, and items, a bunch of plastic figures, and some dice (standard D10s and specialized D6s).

There was a little board warping on one set of my tiles - the tiles used to track hero stats. They flattened out after a night under a heavy book.

You can see the warped boards on the right

The rulebook clocks in a 63 pages and is by far the weakest component in the box. The rules aren't really very thorough, and lead to lots of referencing the rulebook in attempts to answer questions. The book itself is on the lightweight and flimsy side of boardgame rulebooks, and combined with the frequent usage, it gets beaten up pretty quickly.

In Myth, the players assume the role of one of five heroes - a Fighter, a Cleric, an Archer, an Apprentice Mage, and a reformed rat Ninja. The monsters are completely AI controlled with guidelines based on their profile - some monsters are intelligent and will make way for their friends to maximize attacks, while others will simply charge at you as quickly as possible. Some attack the hero with the highest threat, while others just attack the closest target.

Each class plays drastically differently, to the extent that each class gets their own "mini-chapter" in the rulebook explaining how they play and how their cards interact.

The miniatures are fairly high quality for a board game. They're a harder plastic than Descent-style figures, but not quite a hard finely detailed plastic from a GW kit. They are all single piece figures. There are some minor mold lines on several, and a few of my orcs were missing arms or weapons. It's a nice addition that there is variety to the monster sculpts so every monster doesn't look the same.

The heroes are in a slightly lighter plastic to stand out.

 

One big peeve I have with the figures is that many of them utilize a "slotted base" system seen in many miniatures games. Since I intend to paint up these figures, I'll have to go back and fill these with greenstuff or tape over them and use some sort of basing grit to cover them up.

There's two methods of gameplay in Myth - Story Mode and Slaughterfield. Story mode is similar to a Descent style campaign, where heroes slowly evolve and progress through a story guided by quests. Unlike Descent, the tiles, monsters, and miniquests are pseudo randomized, so even playing the same campaign multiple times will be different.

In addition to monsters to fight, each tile has traps and miniquests. The traps can drastically alter how you play through each room, and some traps become extremely difficult on tiles of varying size.

 Tiles can also have smaller quests associated with them, drawn randomly from a deck.

The other game mode you can use is called Slaughterfield. Here, there is no story and no quests. It's a standalone game where the heroes fight off 10 waves of monsters, with a new wave spawning every four cycles. I think this mode is best for one-off games, but it's extremely difficult. In fact, after playing about five times, the farthest we've gotten is wave 6.

 Props:

• Enough randomization of tiles, quests, and monsters to keep replayability high
• Pretty good quality components - both the board and figures
• Challenging - nothing is worse than a dungeon crawler that's too easy
• Different enough from Descent, SDE, and other similar games

Slops:

• The rules and the rulebook are lacking. Expect frequent trips to YouTube, BGG, and other sites to answer questions
• The game kinda forces you to take a healer. While some classes are self-sufficient, others are not and require the support class to succeed. I don't like being forced to always have a certain class in my party

Overall, I'm enjoying Myth, and currently have some of the figures on my painting table. Expect to see some batreps of it soon!