My first action, like most of us, is to open the box and rifle through the contents. I'd rate the components as pretty solid, say eight out of ten. Thick card for the play-area boards, coated cards for the decks. Not a whole lot of stuff for the price, but not cheap or shabby. The artwork is adorable, the graphic design pretty solid. But here I noticed my first gripe. On my first go through the cards, through the pile of 'starting students' I started to worry I'd gotten a bum set. There were eight or ten copies of each card. Then through the other students deck. And the faculty deck. Multiple copies of each card. Not a huge issue...but if the players are playing different 'Houses' in the school, a-la Hogwarts...why do they all have the same students? How does the game explain the likelihood of having multiples of the same student on the board? To the rulebook for answers!
First impression of the rulebook was, again, one of decent quality. Nice and short, hopefully showing the game has simple rules. Until I started reading. Six pages of rules, I noticed at least two editing errors. Now, in a longer book, two would be fine...but in six pages? Then I started noticing oddities in the rules. In the opening blurb that describes the game, it refers to it being a deck-building game multiple times....but nowhere in the game do you actually build a deck. Your starting deck is built of multiple copies of the same exact students as every other player...which is rather disappointing on it's own to me...why not have put in a little extra effort and come up with unique girls for each house? Or at least a starting deck without multiples of each girl. From there, the phases are:
1: Go to the bank - Here, you draw cards. First, from your 'Purchase Pile' then from your deck.
2: Stock the school store - Here, you fiddle with the Student and Faculty decks to make sure new ones cycle through
3: Pay Your Tuition: Here you either buy one and only one of each from the store with points generated by your cards, or accept a 'Substitute' or 'Transfer Student', which are free but weak. The student goes into your 'Purchase Pile' (rather then your Deck, you know, so there's actually deck building in the game that describes itself over and over as a Deck Building game) and the teacher goes into the 'Purchase Pile' of the player on your left. For some reason, the last sentence of this section is 'Don't put cards from your hand immediately into your Discard pile after you make a purchase, wait until the correct time' Even though there's no mention of discarding in the section, and no mention of the correct time to discard anywhere else in the rules, nor the suggestion you're ever even allowed to discard by choice.
4: Pre-Class! - Here you make use of the students you have in your hand, using special abilities the student cards have. All of the Faculty members in your hand go into your classroom...and then, for some unknown reason, you discard all the students in your hand. You know, the ones you planned out and bought last turn or drew earlier this turn. Into the Discard Pile with them!
5: Class! - Here, you draw from your deck yet again, one card for each Faculty in your classroom. The fight happens! The core of the game is here, where the Faculty is killed by your girls, and then the survivors do damage to your Sanity, after subtracting the defenses of your girls.For some reason, it talks about drawing teachers from your deck, and turning them into Pet Teachers which throws them into other player's discard piles.
6: Class Dismissed - All the cards in the classroom get tossed into the Discard Pile.
There's also a side-bar describing the 'Aggressive' rule on some cards, which forces another player to have an out-of-sequence Class! and Class Dismissed phases, and the 'Friendly' rule on some cards that allows the 'Friendly' student to go straight to class and be a bonus card in the Class! fight step.
Now...there's one major flaw with these rules. One mechanic that, to me as an experienced game-player, is suggested by the rules but never (that I read, I might have missed it somehow) actually stated is that when your deck runs out, you need to recycle your discard pile into it. How this was missed is beyond me, as all the effects that put Faculty into other player's Discard piles, all the manipulations of your own Discard pile are absolutely pointless without it.Not to mention the game just...stops about three turns in.
So we've got a game that has a great concept with a lot of promise, solid artwork and graphic design, passable components that totally and completely falls flat on a reading of the rules.
4 out of 10 on the just-now-invented Pirate Point scale. A waste of fifty bucks.
Edit: After the first play-through with friends, it seems that the game does, in fact, suck. We house-ruled in the obvious Discard Pile shuffle-recycle mechanic, and it played well enough, but by the middle of the game, we were all entirely bored of it. One of the other players got lucky and drew two copies of a card that did damage to all the other players, and this was the only thing that did any Sanity damage to any of us. It was taking so long for us to be beat down, playing the same cards and doing the same thing over and over again that when it was down to me and him, I quit rather then be forced to play more turns. So the rating stays at 4 of 10. Would not buy. It was bad enough that the friend who bought it is seriously thinking of bitching until the store we got it from takes it back, which is something she never does.
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Miskatonic School for Girls |
