We picked up Miskatonic School for Girls at PAX East 2012 and we’ve since sat down and played several hands of the two-player variant of the game. Here’s my specific feedback in Exciting Bullet Point Form.
– The packaging and game pieces are professionally done. Nothing about this game feels cheap due to being kickstarted. The play boards are sturdy. The cards have attractive art on front and back. The instructions are bright and clear. Pieces return to the box with relative ease.
– The game itself takes about five minutes to set up for a 2 player hand. Decks sort into their respective piles. What goes where is clear after a quick look at the instructions.
– The art for the monsters is top notch and the monster names are adorably Lovecraftian and clever. The girl cards were bland in art and name, making it hard to tell what was a real “key buy.”
– We were up and playing a first hand quickly. The instructions are easy to understand to anyone who has played a Dominion-like deck-building game in the past. By the way, folks: if you have not played Dominion and you want to play any of the new card-and-board games on the market, find someone who has Dominion and play several hands. Every hot new game uses some “twist” on the Dominion deck building mechanics.
– Every turn in the “buy” phase, a player buys a girl for their House (ala Harry Potter) and a new member of the faculty of the school who is, naturally, some horrible abomination from beyond the stars. These go into the purchase pile and always come out next turn. Like Ascension, Miskatonic provides stock “buys” of transfer students and substitute abominations should a player not be able to buy a student or a faculty that turn.
– Miskatonic School for Girls has a nice twist on Dominion-like play: when buying a horrible member of the faculty, one plays it into one’s opponent’s deck and, like any “buy,” must come out next turn. So you, the player, has incentive to buy the biggest, nastiest monster on the board and send it into your opponent’s deck knowing well they must deal with it immediately while at the same time buying the most amount of “fight” into one’s house to defend against whatever is being sent into your deck. This sets up a nice bit of tension and competition over cards on the board and strategic buys.
– And as a second twist, whenever a monster ends up in a player’s hand from drawing a hand, at the end of the buying phase, the player has to fight the Cthuloid horror with students in the house. Should the students fail to hold off the horrid Lunch Lady from Beyond, the House as a whole takes sanity damage. When sanity hits 0, the player is out of the game.
– Faculty and students get shuffled into the deck after buy-and-fight phases ala any deck building game so faculty can pop out of the deck at any time to gnaw on the student’s heads. Near the end of the game, a player can draw an entire hand of pure faculty which is, as we discovered, bad.
– The game has a built in “sanity death spiral.” As the decks grow, more faculty come out. As more faculty come out, more students lose sanity. As more students lose sanity… It’s a nice mechanic.
– Cards do have different effects on them — both girls and monsters. They were a bit forgettable, though. For an expansion: punchier effects!
– The game does have generators the same way Ascension has constructs. They felt a little undercosted and overpowered but still… generators are good.
– The game’s play is considerably more Ascension-like than Dominion-like, although the games are close in play and composition. If you like Ascension, you will certainly like Miskatonic School for Girls. If you believe Ascension is an abomination upon the Earth and a blight on all deck building games you should stick with Dominion and its 10,000 expansion packs.
– An entire game takes 30-40 minutes, tops.
We enjoyed it. I would gladly play it again. I would lug the game over to a friend’s house to play several hands. What struck me during play was how well expansions of monsters and students would fit into the gameplay seamlessly so I have some expectation of expansions in the future. For Fun to 11’s first stab at a commercial product, it’s a success.
Recommended buy for the deck building card-and-board gamer in your life.
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