There's another way to go...get Star Trek: Frontiers instead of MK. The objective is based on the chosen scenario. It's a game that takes up all of board game night. Gloomhaven is that same type of game, it will just suck out all the oxygen in the room. If that tells your anything. If we're gonna play Mage Knight, we're gonna play some fucking Mage Knight. My husband is a real stickler for the rules. Review Summary:. We found out we were messing up a rule two years and over a hundred playthroughs after we got it. That brings us to combat. In brief, the warnings about the time commitment to play this game are all completely true. I found Robinson Crusoe far worse despite being a simpler game, let alone fiddly games with truly awful rulebooks like Pax Porfiriana. When fighting non-players, the target does not get an incoming ranged attack as in PvP. I own both for solo play. MK attracts people who want to get the rules right and have nobody nearby to ask. At the local boardgames group people get rules wrong all the time for even the simplest games but the difference is they either don't care or ask someone else nearby. We're constantly checking the rule book because we only play once every few months so we get rusty. I expect to play it more often, but even if I only play it once or twice a year I will still feel it's definitely worth having on my shelf. Is it kind of just understood that it takes a long time to play a game perfectly or do I need to step up my game? Any game even remotely similar will get pushed aside and I fear Mage Knight will not feel unique enough. Mage Knight has several different scenarios that are available, some cooperative, that can be played. This game is definitely geared toward a hardcore gamer and even then, if you fail your (personal) fortitude save at any point during the day while playing this game the play time can easily be artificially extended due to failing to pay attention, inserting breaks, playing Gems on an iPhone, etc. If you cannot block all of the incoming attack you are going to take at least 1 wound. No no, I did. They're sufficiently different, but it depends if you'll have the time for both. Summary And it never fails that the next time I talk to one of the players in our group it starts my be telling them that we were breaking/leaving out a game changing rule. Whilst different games, they do occupy the same niche. To be fair, that grain is there for every game that I'm playing two-handed. Yup, it's such a complex interconnected brain burner that mistakes are inevitable. Sometimes we even clarify a rule that makes the game too easy or we find a mistake we made that we actually prefer over the rule so we just keep it as a house rule for next time.