Base price: $XX.
2 – 4 players.
Play time: ~30 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter! (Will update link when Kickstarter is live.)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A preview copy of Mischief was provided by Dream Cult Game Studio. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
I should probably stop writing in dark rooms. I’m trying to get this review done and, honestly, I’m drifting off. Nothing to do with the game, to be honest (and I’ve reviewed actually boring games before), so I figure it’s sitting in my dimly-lit living room. That’s Seattle for; first of September and suddenly the whole earth has been frozen over as far as they’re concerned. The winters are pretty dark, to be fair, but I digress. I’d rather talk about games than the weather anyways, so let’s launch right into it with Mischief!
In Mischief, Titania and Oberon are finally locking it down, and you’ve been invited to the wedding! Unfortunately, you’re probably going to lose a lot of standing from the union of these two kingdoms, so you’re hastily trying to figure out how you can align yourself with whichever factions are going to come out of this looking the best. You’re not afraid to play a little underhanded, granted, but friendship and trust can go a long way, too. Sometimes it’ll get you an audience with the Queen, but honestly, most of the time everyone appreciates a really good surprise prank. What’s your pathway back to good graces?
Contents
Setup
To start off, you’re going to remove a number of colors based on the player count:
- 2 players: Use four colors of cards and tokens and such.
- 3 players: Use five colors of cards and tokens and such.
- 4 players: Use everything!
You can choose whichever you like best. Shuffle the Faerie Cards:
You’ll want to make a spaced-out row of the Table Cards. You’ll need room for cards above and below each Table Card, and you’ll want at least a card-width space between each Table Card for Invitation Cards. More on that later.
Place the various tokens aside. The hexes will be used later.
The big circular tokens go on their various spots on the Table Cards.
Start the card setup by seeding the play area:
- 2 players: Seed with four cards.
- 3 players: 3 cards.
- 4 players: 2 cards.
Seeding is simple. Just draw a card and play it above (light) or below (dark) its corresponding Table Card, with some exceptions:
- No two cards of the same faction. If that would happen, set the second card aside and draw a new one.
- No cards of the same number and opposite factions. Again, if that would happen, set the new card aside and draw again.
Once you’ve done that, shuffle the set-aside cards from seeding back into the deck and deal one card into what’ll be called the Invitation Row (face-up). I typically place that to the left of all the Table Cards. Deal one card face-down to the right of each Table Card (another Invitation Card). Then, deal each player 13 cards. The rest of the cards are “burned”, or set aside out of the game. The player to the left of the dealer starts!
Gameplay
This one’s pretty straightforward turn to turn. Each turn, you play a card and then can optionally swap a card! That’s most of it. What happens when you play a card depends on what you play where.
- Friendship: If you play a card that’s sequentially one above or below a card of the same faction, the higher-value card is now Protected. Take the unlocked Friendship Token of the faction’s color and light / dark. If you already have that token, it’s locked now. Nobody can take it!
- Trick: If you play a card that’s the same value as an unprotected card on the opposite side of the Table Row (same color, but different dark / light), then discard the other card and take the unlocked Trick Token of that color. If you already have the Trick Token, flip it to its Locked side. Nobody can take it back if it’s Locked!
- Invitation: If you play a 1 or a 5, take the face-down Invitation Card and add it face-up to the Invitation Row.
Note that you can activate all three of those in one turn (say, if you play a light Green 5 when a dark Green 5 and a light Green 4 have already been played).
At the end of your turn, you may take a card from the Invitation Row and swap it for a card in your hand.
Once each player only has five cards left in hand, everyone burns one and reveals the remaining four. Those are now the cards you play to influence factions!
Total up the value of the light and dark cards for each faction. Whichever side has a higher value is currently winning. If there’s a tie, there’s no Leading Faction.
This is where it gets complicated. Total the values including revealed cards from players’ hands. This could lead to three circumstances:
- Dance with the Queen: If there was no Leading Faction before revealed cards were added or the Leading Faction didn’t change, Dance with the Queen takes place! Use the Queen (6 point) and the Handshake (5 point) tokens for that color.
- Surprise Prank: If the Leading Faction changes, now the Surprise Prank is in effect. Use the Jack-in-the-Box (10 point) and the Banana Peel (7 point) tokens.
- No tokens: If there’s a tie now between the two factions, no tokens for that color will come into play this game.
Then, score each faction based on the cards played!
- Dance with the Queen: If Dance with the Queen is in effect, the player who played the lowest card for that faction gets the Queen token, and the second-lowest gets the Handshake token!
- Surprise Prank: Highest card for that faction wins the Jack-in-the-Box token, and second-highest gets a Banana Peel.
- Toast Bonus: Either way, any player who played a 3 of the Leading Faction gains an additional 3 points (plus any other points they gain from tokens).
Total up your points and the player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
It’s going to get chaotic with more players, on this one. With two, you still have pretty good odds that other players can steal your tokens or flip around a given faction at any time. With four? Good luck. Seven factions in play, a wider distribution of cards, and no way to really plan who has what based on turn order? It’s going to be a hectic game no matter what you do. There’s some chance that with more player there’s an inclination to pick on certain players by trying to routinely deny them tokens, which is frustrating, but that’s more of a function of your hand’s composition than anything else. The same thing could be true unintentionally; you just happen to have a hand of cards that thwarts another player entirely. At two, that’s less of a concern since the game is fairly zero-sum (as are many two-player games). It does seem like the 2 / 3 player space is probably more of a sweet spot, as a result, so that’s probably where I’d stay.
Strategy
- Lock your tokens down! You don’t want other players stealing them. If you earn Friendship, try to do it again quickly. If you Trick, Trick again next turn if you can. Locking tokens down makes them more valuable, as well. Easier said than done, but swapping cards with the Invitation Row can occasionally give you what you need as other players change out.
- I tend to keep 3s of Factions I think are going to win, for the extra points. It’s 3 free points, if you can land it (again, a bit easier with two players).
- Try to activate as many tokens as you can in a given turn. Playing a card that Tricks and Protects is a huge move! Covers a lot of ground and makes it hard for any one player to invalidate your turn by taking the one token you got away from you.
- If a player has lots of tokens, try to claim a few from them. Can’t let other players have points!
- Keep in mind that the more distinct cards you have in your hand, the better your chances of taking the final point tokens. You can double up on certain color / faction combos, but there’s not really a point to having both factions of a color unless you’re hedging your bets. Ideally, you’d be getting first or second in a bunch of categories, but be careful! Many players only try to do a Surprise Trick (where you change the leading faction at the end) if they feel like they can actually score the big value. You don’t really want to come in third for anything, is what I’m saying.
- You can count cards, a bit, but keep in mind some are usually left out of the game. This can at least help you if you have the rest of a faction + color combination in your hand, but trying to predict who has what is usually pretty pointless with those extra cards remove.
- Playing off of a Seed Card is a usually-good first move. They’re there to let you start with Friendship or a Trick, so do that if you can. You may not always have the cards for it, which is a bummer though.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- The art is quite nice! It’s not entirely done, which threw us off a bit (some cards have the same art), but what they do have is quite pleasant.
- It’s a pretty intricate short card game, if that’s your kind of thing. Not many cards but enough rules to keep things relatively interesting from game to game.
- A lot of control points, too. If you’re looking for a highly-interactive game, you’ll be swapping tokens around and trying to vie for control of different factions pretty much the whole time! It’s fairly involved.
- Fairly compact. It’s not a ton of cards or tokens, so you can pretty effectively port it around.
- Getting a token that is a handshake from the Queen instead of a dance is pretty funny. It feels like you really went down in her esteem compared to the next guy.
- I really like the Invitation Row. Having a card game where everyone can swap in and out carsd they do or do not want? It’s an elegant way to increase passive player interaction.
Mehs
- It is a game where you’d like a playmat. You’ll be lifting cards pretty much every turn (to place other cards below them) so if you’re playing on the wrong table surface you’re likely to mess your cards up a bit.
Cons
- The rules for this, so far, are kind of a doozy. The core gameplay loop isn’t too challenging, but there are a lot of configurations that can emerge within the game from how certain things are done, so things like setup and scoring can be a bit hard for new players to remember. Our first game was a bit of a slog, as a result. The current rules also refer to how you set things up on the playmat and how that’s different than the standard game, and more generally, if I don’t have a playmat I don’t necessarily feel like I need to read a bunch of playmat-based changes.
- Lots of readability issues throughout the game. It’s mostly on small things, like tokens, but it’s very hard to tell which side is which, numerically, based on just looking at them. If the tokens were bigger, this might be less of an issue. In general and in-game, the 3s tend to look a bit similar to the 5s, which can be distracting (even on the cards).
Overall: 6.75 / 10
Overall, it took me a play to get there, but I like Mischief! I think our first play was just rough because, as I mentioned, the rules can be kind of a lot for new players. There’s a lot of finicky placement of small tokens in setup and not everything is clearly labelled in the rulebook, so we weren’t entirely sure of what was going on. Then, Final Scoring is a doozy because it has faction advantage calculations, then revealing your hand, and then faction advantage might switch and that influences how you score points for the cards you revealed. It’s … a little complicated. Pleased to report that in our subsequent play, however, the game felt a lot more streamlined (and I assume as we play more, final scoring will start to get progressively more entrenched in our brains). A bit more clear design around the numbers and the tokens (or larger tokens) would go a long way towards this, though, so I hope we see some of these changes in the final version. The art is quite nice, so I’m excited to see what the full version with all unique art looks like, for instance. Guess we’ll see on the Kickstarter page. Dan Cassar’s got the design pedigree for challenging but tiny card games (for me, mostly by way of Arboretum), so this fits into his oeuvre, as far as I can tell. It might not be the game I bring to a game night with all new folks, but for experienced card gaming fans or the rare aficionado of casual games, this would probably be a hit. If you jive with the theme, you enjoy ruining a fancy party, or you just want to throw some cards down and see what happens, it may be worth checking out Mischief! I thought it was fun.
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