When I saw the team from Paranoid on BoW talking about their new Kickstarter Project, Mythos, I fell in love. The lore they covered in their interview, the art, the miniature design.... it was all just stunning. I watched the interview twice in succession!

I then went on to tell my friends about it and we all chipped in for a big pledge, quite giddy with excitement. It sounded so cool! Insanity, flipping the cards which changed how the models interacted, sounded like a really interesting and unique mechanic. Coupled with the awesome art and minis design, we were really quite excited. Then the game arrived! WOW! These looked awesome! I had a great time painting them!

Then I read the rules......... ok, I thought, these sound pretty basic but, you know, the proof is in the pudding, so we played it.

Turns out the pudding had no proof. The game was incredibly basic. Everything moves, attacks, moves, attacks, moves.........snore.......

I have a few issues with the game, one of them being the "live" combat (I did feel a bit confused when they introduced this mechanic as if it had never been done before). "Live" combat works like this: Both players roll two D6 and add a stat, then you compare results, whomever rolls the highest wins the combat with the difference in the number being how successful the attack was. This in itself is not a bad core mechanic, there's lots to play around with here in terms of model abilities and interactions, sadly this was an avenue not terribly well explored in the design. Models had very little in the way of ability to affect the rolls. Besides this, a lot of the stats were quite similar across the models (even across factions), which meant that combat pretty much boiled down to whomever could roll the highest. Most of the time this meant a few points of damage here and there, but the spikes were devastating. Boring, frustrating, repetitive, dull.

My second major gripe was the miniature rules themselves, pretty much everything just attacks. The Angler? Described in the fluff as luring people to their doom by the docks, no lure abilities, he just attacks. Molly? A hidden monster? Potential for some stealthy, sneaky, assassin-y style rules.......... nah, she just attacks. How about the goat? The soul of a child, twisted into a rampaging beast...scared, angry.......maybe a little uncontrollable? Maybe requiring some guidance to behave properly? Nah, he just attacks.

It's so dull, which is hugely disappointing considering the amazing fluff and design that went into the art and sculpts of these characters.

But! What about the insanity mechanic!? That's cool! That should shake things up! No?

No, no it doesn't. A couple of models do cool stuff when they go insane, but most just have a minor change in abilities or stats. It really doesn't change much at all.

We've since sold off all of our things. The game is fine as a "pick up and play" or "beer and pretzels" style game, but there's no longevity here. A truly disappointing experience.