First Impressions of Mystic Vale

Is that the sound of summer I hear? The soft whispering of the breeze through the glade, the contented chirruping of small animals, the gentle trickling of a stream over the pebbles…

“Nnnyyaaarghh!”

The screams of anguish as someone goes bust again? This is Mystic Vale! A beautiful game of beautiful landscapes and magical creatures and delightfully special mechanisms. And curses. Lots of curses. You won’t be able to make out the victory point chips the air will be so blue!

You see, Mystic Vale is deck building game, where you are free to keep drawing additional cards from your deck, as long as you like! Except, borrowing from Flip City, if you ever reveal too many red symbols you go bust and lose all the cards you drew this turn! Inevitably eliciting a frustrated wail from that player, and laughter from everyone else. It does give you a free resource to use in a later turn though…?

The truly exciting part of this game though, the bit that has everyone excited (apart from the gorgeous art), is how you spend the game building the cards you’re playing with! What!? I know! It works by buying transparent plastic cards from a central market that you slide into the card’s sleeve. Not only is Mystic Vale the only deck builder in which the size of your deck never changes, it is probably also the only game to have card sleeves as an integral component of the game!

Each transparency has some (illustrated!) feature on it, giving resources or victory points and maybe some effect that takes up one third of the full card. You can therefore add up to three of these separate segments to a single card (some cards start with one, some are blank) asking you how you want your cards to behave? Do you want single, powerful cards in a barren deck, or a sweeping savannah of options every time you draw?

There is also a tableau-building element, demanding different sets of nature symbols to acquire, distinct from the resource you have available at the start of the game. Another thing to consider when buying your transparencies, as these give you extra stuff every turn of the game. The degree to which you pursue these elements is up to you though, as you can collect a lot of victory points direct from the transparencies themselves. Although you’ll probably want to get some of these tableau cards if only because they are the prettiest part of the game!

The card building is such a cool and intuitive mechanic, yet feels completely fresh. Classic deck builders are satisfying because you feel like you can do increasingly more powerful or more interesting stuff, yet there is often duff cards in your deck that either get in your way or you proceed to ignore for the rest of the game. In Mystic Vale, this never happens. Rather than adding to your deck, you take the limited to useless cards you start with and gently refine them into a card you love to see drawn, like a carver bringing out a sculpture from piece of waste wood. Even the cards you never add to merely feel like a blank canvas waiting for your attention, and the push-your-luck draw rules mean they don’t even waste time in your hand.

If you enjoy deck builders I would say (based on this first impression, of course) that this is a game you have to play. Looking back, this is damn strong contender for game of the convention for me… but maybe that’s just because I won!