Mythotopia Review

Martin Wallace’s Mythotopia reminds me of a Terrence Malick movie. You know you’re watching something inspired, artful and innovative, even brilliant. Yet the pacing is so slow it’s difficult to wade through and the whole time you think you’re missing something. Now Wallace is certainly a more prolific game designer than Malick is a movie director, and that volume of experience I think proves beneficial here.

Mythotopia uses the same unique deck-building mechanic as A Few Acres of Snow and A Study in Emerald. I’ve not played those spiritual predecessors – the former because I didn’t jump on the bandwagon early enough and the latter because I avoid anything Cthulhu. In this third design, Wallace ports the system to a fantasy world, with a Game of Thrones-lite vibe.

The deck-building engine which drives Mythotopia will be familiar to anyone interested the genre. After that, throw away most of what you’ve come to know about the mechanic. You still begin with a weak deck of actions and resources. But rather than playing and/or discarding an entire hand every turn, you only use enough cards to take two actions and then draw back to your hand limit. If you want to discard anything you’ll have to burn one of your precious actions. In fact, there are 15 actions to choose from. Some are simple while others take careful planning.

Every action involves one or more cards. Most of them are played to do things like recruit troops, invade territory, build infrastructure and acquire other cards. You earn points by capturing land and claiming tokens from victory point cards upon meeting their stated objectives. You can strengthen your deck by purchasing improvement cards which provide extra actions, special abilities and additional resources. There is only one copy of each card – first come, first serve. This scarcity builds some tension as players scramble for the best options. Also, the improvement cards and victory objectives vary each game. So there are both nice choices and replayability.

A few actions require stringing together a group of items, sometimes over multiple turns. For example, to build a town or road you must play the actual Build action card, a Province card where you wish to build, and then additional cards to cover the required resource cost. You may use a card for only one of those elements. Invasions involve a similar logistical dance. To facilitate gathering these eggs in one basket, Mythotopia includes an ingenious Reserve mechanic. For one action, you may lay a card to your Reserve, which sets it aside for later use. It’s rather brilliant, even though it adds to the game’s slow pacing.

While the game is extremely well-crafted and seems to be solidly play-tested, it never really “pops.” There are a couple of reasons. The biggest one is because players aren’t really sure why they’re doing what they’re doing. The setting is almost non-existent. Though there’s an attempt to introduce a low fantasy story with rule book fluff and dragon tokens, it doesn’t make sense within the game’s mechanics. You earn points by meeting the various criteria on objective cards like building roads, defending a territory, getting ships in certain spots, and maybe by merely cashing in a couple coins. You do these things because the mechanics say that’s how you earn points. There’s little rhyme or reason.

Second, the game is glacially slow-paced. The most interesting actions require cobbling together a string of cards and/or setting up a number of tokens in preparation for invasion so that invariably you’re missing an important piece at a critical time. The Reserve mechanic is brilliantly designed to mitigate unlucky draws, but it does little to speed up the game. The fact that you need to use it means that you’re setting up a run to achieve in several turns what you’d rather do in one. Even wars are anti-climactic. Instead of action-packed fights, they’re extended sieges which take at least one turn. In reality, they generally last longer as each side extends the campaign multiple rounds by feeding it more troops – eating up actions and resources that could be used elsewhere.

Lastly, you sort of stumble upon the ending. When four objective cards are exhausted of their tokens, the end game triggers. If a player has more points at the beginning of his turn, he can declare victory. Otherwise, keep playing. Then the pace can drag even more. Sure, players will be jockeying for position trying to eke out every extra point they can. There may even be some going after the leader. But rather than creating a tense showdown of brinksmanship, it’s a constant counting exercise to see who has enough to win the game. And you may even realize who the winner will be before his next turn with no way for anyone to stop him, and so you go ahead and end it then. Essentially it all wraps up like an exposited denouement rather than an acted-out climax.

What you have then is a strategic slough which is clever, but logistically cumbersome. It has tremendous variety and depth which rewards careful planning, patience and even stubbornness. It’s one of those designs where you often find yourself short-handed and can’t do everything you want. Usually that creates tension. In Mythotopia it’s an anchor for all but hardcore strategists and fans of Chess.

Which brings us back to Terrence Malik. Far from commercial hits, his movies like Badlands, The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life were nonetheless critical successes. Artistic jewels whose brooding pensiveness just didn’t resonate with the masses. Mythotopia lies within a similar connoisseur’s vein of the tabletop hobby. Yes, it is superbly crafted, but almost too ambitiously contemplative. It has meaty depth, simmering strategy and hidden subtlety that stalwart gamers or Wallace fans might reflectively chew on. However, its slow pace, lack of excitement and limited deck-building will barely nudge the needle above mediocrity for mainstream players, and only then but for Wallace’s practiced touch.