Mage Knight Board Game - Tips & Strategies

I would HIGHLY recommend the Android app “Mage Knight Dummy Player”. This helps to make solo and co-op games go by MUCH faster. Since it doesn’t require the use of any physical cards, it can also essentially free up the “dummy” deck/character for another player to use, increasing the co-op player max to 4.

For solo games, it makes it much easier as you just need to track one action card color, and one spell card color at the end of each round, instead of flipping cards for an NPC deck.

Makes games run much more smoothly, and it’s very simple/easy to use. One note – there IS an option to save, mid-game. During the game, the “options/settings” button at the bottom of the screen (on the notification bar, fourth one from the left) will bring up a “Save” option. When restarting the app, a RESTORE button appears, allowing you to easily continue a game.

The most recent expansion Shades of Tezla has gained notoriety for having major production quality issues, including Monster Tiles that are 20% smaller than all other ones! At first, this was a very frustrating dilemma, but after reading discussion between other players, a solution appeared that should also help me bring this awesome game to the table more often. Using dice bags to hold and randomize monster tokens instead of stacking them on the table.

The number one reason I don’t play it as often as this game deserves, is my aversion to the massive amount of set-up and tear-down that surrounds each play. Rows of tiles and columns of various decks of cards, all of which need to be individually shuffled and stacked create an expenditure of energy daunting enough to steer me towards less labor-intensive games.

With dice bags, almost all of the tasks revolving around the tokens is eliminated. This gives me more time to play and enjoy this wonderful adventure! I should have thought of this earlier, but thankfully Wizkids’ dubious quality control has helped me find the light.

Maximizing the potential of your hand by choosing amongst the many ways it can be played is part of the finesse that makes this game great. But by tracking your Deed deck and knowing what cards you can expect to draw into, you can take your game to the next level.

After playing a few times, you should be familiar with the approximate amounts of each type of card in your deck. If you just played many cards that give you movement, you should realize that over the next few turns, your character won’t be going too far from where he currently is!

A single combat card in hand usually will not be enough to help you purge a nearby enemy. Common practice is to just play it sideways to get 1 point of something else useful in the current turn. However, if you know that you will be drawing into the rest of your combat enhancing cards, it may be stronger to hold that single combat card until it can be matched with the upcoming ones for a really big attack next turn.

Make the effort to learn the composition of your deck and you will attain a new level of mastery in this game!

Just about everyone who has a bunch of friends to play board games with will have at least one friend who just will NOT plan their turn during other people’s turn. There are plenty of games where this is not an issue. This is not one of them.

The game is going to take a couple of hours with 3 or 4 players who know what they are doing and everyone is firing on all cylinders making the turns go quickly and smoothly. One person who doesn’t even look at the board, let alone their cards until their turn comes up is going to add at least an hour to this. Worse, inevitably they are going to fall in love with the game and want to play it every time they come over, and everyone else is going to hate the game and never want to play it again.

There is no reason that someone like this can’t have fun with a gaming group without causing others to pull their hair out, but there are much better options out there than Mage Knight to do that with.

This game is complicated!! If you plan on teaching someone the game, tell them that player on player combat won’t be available for the first game. Just go your own way and learn the basics first, it takes a little while to see what the deck is truly capable of and an experienced player will decimate a newbie nine times out of ten which will detract from the gameplay experience. Let them get a firm grasp of the rules first – then decimate them in the next game!

There are a lot of bits to Mage Knight (and, they all come prepunched, with the figures being pre-painted!)

What I found works well for storage is:

– Put together 4 baggies, one for each of the players (this is alluded to in the walkthrough book). I added a post-it note in each bag that details what goes in it. In essence, everything related to a given character goes in their bag except the figure. I keep the four figure and four cities in the insert they come in. There is space for these 4 baggies under the figure/city insert. The figures and cities fit snugly into their slots, making it safe to flip the insert upside down to fill with the baggies, and then place this insert piece back as it arrives.

– The thinner middle section of the insert I’ve removed. This leaves the right amount of space for the monster tokens, crystals, and dice. Each color of monster is in its own bag, the crystals are in a bag, and the dice in another.

– The third piece of the insert I use (mainly to keep map tiles well secured, as they have a form fitting well). I put all of the remaining cards in a single baggy (advanced action, wounds, artifacts, units, spells, location aids, etc.) This bag will then fit in the well that the cards initially came in.

You can then put the fame and day/night boards on top with the rules, and the box will close flat.

One note, I do not sleeve my cards. If you do sleeve, you will likely need to removed the third insert holding the map tiles and cards. Without the insert you’ll lose the map tile spot, but you should gain plenty of space for the cards. A single bag will probably be too small, but having a bag for different types should work well.

After playing the prescribed scenarios several times, I started to mess with the shape of the Mage Knight “world”. I’ve created a circular world where green tiles eventually transform into the brown tiles then back to green as one takes a full lap and returns to the portal tile. This means not having tiles in the center, and players could choose either direction to start their adventure. My son and I have “raced” around this circle while accumulating as much fame as possible as we battle foes, and capture mage towers and cities along the way.

The tiles that come with the Lost Legion expansion pack may be necessary. I use the A side of the portal tile to keep the circle 3-wide.

The rule set in this game is long. My game group tried to play it cold, and that was a big mistake. Two of the four did not want to play again. I, however, can see the potential of Mage Knight to be a great game with a few plays.

So, how to avoid this problem? Read the rules and do the walkthrough like they suggest… but, when you introduce the game, play the advanced rules with combat. The walkthrough is too dry to captivate anyone. All four of us felt like it was missing something, and 3 hours is a long time to play a bland game.

Tip ~ Learn rules ahead of time… introduce the advanced game!

I worry I will not get this back to the table because of my mistake.

Very simple advice: take your time… especially on solitaire.

What I mean by taking it slow is moving slowly across the map. Running ahead and trying to explore everything tends to leave you weaker when you run into cities, dragons, and the like. Spending a lot of movement to get back to the weaker enemies takes too much time, so I recommend crawling across the map, defeating everything as you go.

On solitaire this is especially true. The dummy player rarely presses you for time, so take it slow and build your level up before you reach those massive cities.

we time everyone to take under 3 mins a turn to shorten the game time a bit