Vale of the Wild Review

Once you’ve wandered through the Mystic Vale for long enough, you might come across the Vale of the Wild. The topiary is a bit rougher here, the flowerbeds running rampant, and would it kill you to run a lawn mover around occasionally!? Well, at least someone is here to take charge because the curse afflicting Mystic Vale has perhaps hit here hardest of all. Prepare to see red.

Players: 2-4
Time: 45 min
Ages: 14+
Designer: John D. Clair
Artist: (missing from BGG, will update when I’m back with the box)
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG)

Vale of the Wild is the second expansion to the excellent card crafting game, Mystic Vale, although it is the first I’ve played. It adds… Well… More! More Vales, more transparent upgrades, more mechanics. So find a secluded spot to read as we lift the veil on the newest vale in the vale series. Vale vale vale.

Vale.

Wild Thing

It’s time to lose that restraint and embrace the chaos! Mystic Vale taught you that the decent thing to do in vale society was to avoid the dreaded red tree symbols in your deck. They slow you down, cause you to spoil and miss turns, they were all bad. No longer. Vale of the Wild adds numerous cards that like nothing more than a few red trees showing up, cards that benefit from you spoiling, or just encourage you to collect more, and challenge you to deal with the downsides.

The Haunted Hallow vale card and Gaia’s Outcast advancement all offer end game points if you have the most red symbols in your deck at the end of the game, and you can have multiple of these. Likewise, Primal Power and Centaur both offer big benefits if they are the card that causes you to spoil, inviting you to create deadly cards in your own deck.

Mystic Vale has always had the wonderful element of allowing you to focus on using a particular card rule to its full potential, by finding others that combo well with it and adding them to the appropriate cards of your deck. These new options really let you focus in on a completely fresh deck building challenge.

You make my heart sing

But the shift in focus is not even Vale of the Wild’s main mechanical change. The first of those comes in the form of Leaders, noble, full sized cards that take up one of your blank card slots from the start of the game. These excitable characters add a bit of asymmetry to proceedings with a mix of unique powers, encouraging particular play styles.

Each leader can also be fed some quantity of blue mana on a turn in order to upgrade them into their ultimate form. This simply involves pulling the leader out of his or her sleeve, flipping them over, and returning them like some kind of over-dressed pancake. Doing so naturally earns you more points and an even better ability, so it’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with both sides of the card at the start of the game if you want to… Well… Follow their lead.

The second big new feature is the eclipse cards. Transparent advancements that feature the suitably thematic “one transparency in front of another” symbol can have their segment covered by another transparency, allowing you to break one of the cardinal rules of Mystic Vale with them. Truly this is a Wild expansion! The value of a card that rapidly gets wiped out by another is that they have their symbols or rule on the central bar, allowing you to really maximise both the value of a given card, and the volume of a card sleeve. Fortunately, they’ve taken the extra squeeze in their stride so far.

You make everything…

The Mystic Vale expansions are combined with the base game with the elegance you’d expect from an experienced elfin mystic. You take the cards from the expansion and smoosh them into the base game decks so you randomise drawing expansion cards and base game cards. This works well enough with a single expansion. But the more you add, the more diluted the effect will become. There are two expansions out already with a third on its way. I really like the way Vale of the Wild gives you new ways of approaching the game. My concern is that diluting its content will make things less interesting, and expansions with a different focus may directly conflict with its love of cursed trees.

To cause me even more frustration than trying to shuffle decks of transparencies, the expansion cards offer no distinguishing marks to help you separate them from the base game. You must sit there with the card list and carefully separate them by name, a rather time consuming job! It’s probably not something I’ll do often, until I get another expansion… Or want to teach someone new the game… Or just fancy a conventional approach to cursed trees (ignoring them and prettying up the rest of the vale!)

Mystic Vale deserved some expansions and Vale of the Wild is an excellent one. It adds new mechanics, but most importantly it adds new ways to approach the game. Even though it focuses on red trees, you can still play it effectively without pursuing them. While playing this expansion I was able to draw through almost my entire deck on a single turn, something I haven’t done before! The Leaders add a great degree of replay value simply from wanting to play at least a game with each of them to explore focussing my deck around them, and there are 8 in the set! Yes, for those who enjoy Mystic Vale, this is a top notch expansion.

Rating: Groovy