I Was Wrong About Mage Knight

I wrote up Mage Knight on here a while back and gave it a solid rating and talked about it like something I’d loved from the start, and that’s true now, but it wasn’t true two years ago when I actually bought the thing. My second play, I remember sitting at the table with the rulebook open to the combat page for the third time in an hour, trying to work out why my troops could pool attack but not block, and thinking pretty clearly that I was done, that this was a game built by someone who wanted to punish the player for not having the rules memorized cold, and that I should just trade it before I sunk more time into something I didn’t actually enjoy.

I didn’t trade it, mostly out of laziness rather than any principled decision to give it another shot. It sat on the shelf for about four months. Then Deke was over one night and out of games he hadn’t already beaten me at, and I pulled Mage Knight down half apologizing for it in advance, telling him it was probably going to be a slog and we didn’t have to finish it if it wasn’t landing.

Something clicked that third play that hadn’t clicked the first two, and I genuinely can’t point to the exact moment it happened. I think it was somewhere in the second hour, when I finally had enough cards in hand and enough mana banked that a turn stopped being about surviving the icon soup and started being about actually planning three moves ahead, aligning a spell I’d been saving with a crystal I’d been hoarding for exactly this. That’s the feeling I described in the actual review, and it’s real, but I left out that it took me three tries and four months of the thing sitting untouched on a shelf to get there.

I think about that gap sometimes when I’m tempted to write off something after one bad session, a game or a book both. Not every slow start is a hidden gem waiting to click, plenty of things really are just bad, and I’m not walking that back. But I trade games faster than I used to now, and I wonder how many of the ones I let go after one rough evening would have turned into a Mage Knight if I’d given them a second shot on a night when I wasn’t already frustrated walking in. I don’t have an answer. I just know I almost didn’t have this one, and it’s sitting two feet from me on the shelf right now.