In Lovecraftian horror, resistance is generally useless, but gosh do the characters try. They'll cling to society, and order, and knowledge, as if staying within the realm of social constructs will shield them from chaos. Cthulhu's awakening? The solution is simple: calmly visit your local library.
Miskatonic University is a push-your-luck board game for two to five players, by Reiner Knizia. It's also the name of a fictional school, in the fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts. In that school is a library, and today, it's not doing so hot. Eldritch beings roam the shelves, wild magick surges from tome to tome, and the graduate students trapped inside won't stop screaming, which is honestly just annoying. Players are professors, tasked with quickly ducking into the room, grabbing some useful books and sigils, and running out, hopefully with enough material to neutralize this whole situation. If you're the one who saves the day, after all, you might even get tenure.
The push-your-luck game you're probably most familiar with is Blackjack, also known as Twenty-One. In it, the player is always pushed to pull just one more card, because this card could mean victory, but going too far results in instant failure. Miskatonic definitely shares that DNA. Over the course of many rounds, you'll be dramatically telling the dealer "hit me", as you search for the one sigil card that will complete a set and score you points, while avoiding any card you already have a copy of. If you get a copy, you're forcibly ejected from the round, with only the points you got for making sets. Which seems fine on the surface, but end-of-round bonuses mean a lot in this game, and dying doesn't net you any at all. Stay in the library the longest, and you get the most end-of-round points, but leaving the library intentionally is still worth some, and therefore it's much better than being ejected. Because of this, you'll want to keep going and going, but know that if you do, you're flying closer and closer to the sun. Much like any Lovecraft protagonist, really. Seriously, guys, when you discover a temple to a sunken god, I know you're curious, but you should really know when to walk away!
The marriage of theme and mechanics here is great, and the presentation only helps. The box is made to look like a book, and could totally be mistaken for one without close inspection. Inside, the first thing you'll notice is some nice thick custom player boards, with great art of your character's desk, and well defined slots around the edges to help the player intuit how many cards make a set, without them having to check the rules or have it spelled out for them. Three grooves in the board for sigils? I guess sigil sets consist of three cards! That's some great background game design. After that, we've just got tons and tons of cards, in both poker size and small euro size. With so many cards left to fly around getting scrambled and lost, you'd think the game would have some sort of partitioned organization insert, like most board games, right? Nope. Apparently, you've got to deal with the very immersive Lovecraftian experience of going absolutely insane trying to pack this game away after you first play it. You'll need to provide several plastic bags if you want to come back to anything other than a disaster. So, great outer presentation, and great cardboard components, but geez, opening the box to see a pile of sandwich bags full of cards rattling around really kills the mood.
So, so far, we've got a simple game of drawing cards til you either bank or bust, wrapped in a pretty effective Lovecraft theme, which is already pretty great. Where Miskatonic University really shines, though, is its introduction of eight "power" cards per player. Everyone starts with the same ones, providing a totally fair playing field to start out. These do fun things like let you skip a turn, or steal someone else's card, or wipe clean an entire portion of your player board, to make way for new sets and avoid busting. The real meat of this game is in when you use your powers. Some of these powers just straight up let you escape death consequence-free, but once you've used a power card, it's turned face down, and it can only come back for reuse in a couple of very rare and specific ways. Ideally, you'll want to save the powers that give you a flawless escape from death, by using the lesser powers to keep you afloat longer. For example, if you think that you're about to bust, it makes sense to preemptively use a power that lets you clear away some of your cards, instead of waiting to hit an actual dead end and wasting your more impressive powers escaping it.
Sorry for the lighting - this was played under spooky colored bulbs. Happy Halloween!
There's also the wrinkle that not every round has the same set of point bonuses for surviving longest - they're randomized. This means that it might make sense to intentionally lose a round that didn't have very good rewards anyway, so that you can save yourself up for much more profitable situations. Losing a round gives you one of your powers back, so there's quite an incentive to figure out when you can afford to do this. You might never have the luxury, but you feel pretty clever when you realize it could work. Plus, of course, if you die the regular way - that is, accidentally - getting a power back helps you feel like you still have a chance to do better next time.
I call it the control freak's push your luck game. Eight powers is a lot, and it means that a lot less is up to chance than you'd think. Sometimes you do just get terrible runs where you draw three of the same card in a row, burning through your survival power and your actual life, and killing you, but even then, you just get a power back and come back next round. Plus, you had the chance to leave after the first time lady luck screwed you over, and choosing not to made this kind of your fault. You flew too close to the sun. This mix of luck and skill allows the game to work with most crowds.
However, players who are very anti-luck should definitely still avoid it. Sometimes the winner will just be somebody who had tremendous luck. It happens, and part of the enjoyment of push your luck games is to acknowledge that that's okay. If it's not okay for you, that's fine! Avoid the genre, there are lots of other genres out there. If you're looking for other Lovecraft games, that are all about skill, I recommend the wonderful two-player strategy game Tides of Madness. Also, you may come out of this review thinking Mistkatonic looks complicated, and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong. I find it simple to teach to others, but the rulebook took me a while to figure out. I recommend Pairs, or Dead Man's Draw, as two other great options with similar but simplified gameplay.
I play a lot of push your luck games, and I don't know for sure where this ranks among them, though it's certainly high on the list. Do I think you should get it? That depends mostly on how much you enjoy the theme, since that's really what carries the whole thing. It's a really beautiful production, and I felt compelled to share it with you, as if by some ancient eldritch force. It calls me. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!
- V