Pandora's Box campaign

  Only a couple weeks ago, the weekend came around and it was time to get some gaming on.  It had been a little while, so we decided to bust out the Mythic Battles again.  Better, I convinced us to play the scenario from the Core Box.  The reasoning was simple- we have too much stuff!!!  With all the expansions and add-ons, the regular draft in the Skirmish mode could be a bit overwhelming.  But the scenarios tell us what to use and whatever special rules, so let's give that a chance.  

  

  The campaign in the Core Box, called "Pandora's Got a Brand New Box", sees three factions attempting to gather a number of crystallized woes from Pandora's Box.  The campaign is for three games, each affecting the overall results.  Whichever faction gathers up the most crystals by the end of the campaign wins.  But there's a couple of cool kicks to it all. 

  

  Most important of the special rules is the one where a faction my spend their crystals to perform certain actions, including healing or even RESURRECTING heroes and monsters.  This can be very useful considering all the parties involved in the campaign and how lethal they can be.  However, it's a balancing act as any crystals used to perform these special actions are removed from the game and decrease that faction's chance of winning.  

  We played the entire campaign in a single day.  My wife, my son, and I took each of the three factions and played all three scenarios in just a few hours.  My wife took the Ithicans, consisting of the Amazons, Centaurs, Odysseus, and the nigh-unkillable Achilles.  My son, being the much tougher one, took the Spartans which included the Hoplites and Spartans, their leader Leonidas, and the mythical Heracles.  I took Hades and his cohort of monsters and infernal troops just to keep the balance of power in the house.  My force changed a bit between scenarios, but the other two forces did not.  

  What was most strange was that I didn't see a balance between the forces.  Mine included a god and multiple monsters, plus troops to round it all out!  Meanwhile, their forces included a couple of heroes and a bunch of joes and pretty much had the same mission as I do.  It seemed weird right from the beginning.  

Ithacan Alliance

Spartan Alliance

Otherworldly Alliance

  So we, of course, started with the first scenario.  In this one, the beasts of each of the forces (literally for Hades, Achilles and Heracles for the other two) were locked up in cages and needed to get free.  With god-like movement, Hades simply ran up, freed his monsters, and collected the gems like a champ.  Both of the other factions freed their heroes as well, but the game ended so quickly that they had little time to do anything else.

  We originally planned on playing each of the scenarios across a few days, but the first mission was over so quickly that we decided to play the rest of the campaign (it's only three missions, after all).  In this one, Hades is stuck on his throne while his forces have to battle the enemies and capture some more gems for their god.  With quick movement, Hades again won the battle before the enemies really had time to do much.  At this point in the campaign, it's obvious that Hades is going to win...

  Finally, the third mission in less than two hours and it was an uphill battle for the Greeks against Hades and his unstoppable forces.  This mission simply a last chance for the 'good guys' to collect more gems.  But just like before, Hades' monsters move so much quicker than the other factions that they collected the gems and quickly dispatched the enemies.  The final score saw Hades with more objective points (those gems) than both of the other forces combined.  

  So we've played our first campaign right from the core set of this game.  All three games took little time at all.  Unfortunately, I think the scenarios were very unbalanced, starting with the forces.  I played with Hades to keep my son and wife from getting too bitter at each other (they don't have the experience with games to understand that sometimes they're just not balanced) and almost felt bad.  But I would have had to play really bad for them to stand a chance.  

 Now, as most veteran gamers do, I should be upset that the game designers didn't include a more balanced campaign.  But I'm not.  Why?  Because the face of the creators, Leo, already explained that Mythic Battles is a skirmish game where they added scenarios just to give more content for gamers.  In other words, the campaign(s) aren't well-thought out for this game because they aren't the point of it.  We've played a couple dozen skirmish battles (draft your own forces and battle it out across the famous areas) and they've all been awesome!  So the campaign being so unbalanced didn't really hurt my feelings.

  Despite the obvious and predictable outcome, the campaign was fun and just reinforces how good our investment in this game was.  I highly suggest that anyone interested in Greek gods and heroes, battles, and awesome miniatures check it out.  The company is going to be doing a re-release on Kickstarter and will be sending people out to demo the game all over the U.S. (they're already doing it in Europe).  Of course I'll post when that happens (and maybe I'll even be one of the demo-monkies for them!).  Great game!!!