For my birthday, my parents gave me Mice and Mystics. It’s a role-playing-game-in-a-box where several adventurers have been turned into mice to escape the wrath of the evil Venestra. You battle against roaches and rats instead of owlbears and manticores.
We opted to do the side quest in the Kitchens and handled the Roaches, Miz Maggie, and Brodie successfully.
The centipede and spiders took a toll on us.
Unforunately the next-to-last tile had a tough encounter and we couldn’t keep our mice from being captured. We ran out of time for the chapter. But it was super fun and we’ll give it another try soon.
Alex Gustafson 
3 replies on “Mice and Mystics”
Update: On play #2 this afternoon we tried with a new party (with Maginos instead of Filch) and skipped the kitchens. We were able to defeat the last minion on the tunnel entrance tile but during its defense roll it surged and that killed our time. This loss was mostly due to horrible rolling – we’re going to try again tonight and hopefully make it to Barksburg!
Update (again): On play #3 we did worse than ever. I’m not seeing any complaints on BGG about Chapter 1, so I guess we’re just not good at it yet and the dice aren’t on our side. I’ve re-read the rules to make sure we didn’t miss anything – and while we’ve misdone a couple details none would’ve made us lose this bad. We will tasty cheesy victory one day.
Update: On play #4 we finally beat chapter one! We skipped the kitchens and had really awesome rolls. The biggest change we made was a lot more focus on Searching instead of just battling. Too often in previous plays we were rushing every character into battle, and then everyone would get wounded and captured eventually.
We also did a better job of timing out when the minions would be defeated, to avoid extraneous cheese on the minion wheel (and we had fewer surges as a result.)
It also didn’t hurt that Filch (played by Ber) was totally awesome and pretty much single-handedly destroyed all the roaches and rats.
Seriously, this game is addictive. This will probably be the date night for Ber and myself for the next several weeks.