Slime Adventure: The Mystical Forest

Game Review

The glorious S-trio of slimes, spiderlings and skeletons. The first monsters against which your fledgling RPG heroes hone their skills. Slime Adventure: The mystical forest is a card game in which one plays the slimes that evolves against all odds.

The Components:

The Slime Adventure: The mystical forest games comes with 97 playing cards and a rulebook in both English and Chinese. Everything is enclosed in a palm-sized box.

The Cards:

The playing cards consist of:

• 1 Naked Gentleman card

• 10 slime cards

• 36 Adventurer cards

• 30 combat cards

• 20 mutation cards.

The slime cards dictates which slime represents the player in the game and give the player unique abilities depending on the types of slimes. The backsides of the slime cards also contain a game flow cheat sheet.

The adventurer cards is the enemy, resource and score counter. Your slime fights them, eats them, digest them and evolve off them !

The combat cards is the bread and butter of this game. There are three types of combat card representing three different types of attacks that are used by the slimes while fighting.

The mutation cards are additional special abilities the slimes may acquire after consuming adventurers.

They make the slime stronger. They are also considered while determining the winner.

Overall, the anime style artwork and JRPG references are quite appeasing.

Rules:

The game comes with a booklet that explains the rules in both Chinese and English. The rules are not too complicated and are well documented in the rulebook with examples and figures.

Box:

The box is of the nicely made and of the right size. It is approximately palm-sized but big enough for sleeved cards should you decide to put sleeves on them.

The Gameplay

In slime adventure, the players play as slimes with the goal of evolving to be the glorious slime that is ever to be.

Setup:

Each player is dealt a random slime card. The adventurer cards are sorted into six decks and ordered according to the numbers on the upper right corner. Each player is dealt 3 combat cards from the shuffled combat deck. The top three cards of the mutation deck are revealed after shuffling the mutation deck.

Phase of Play:

Each player can perform the following during their turn:

• Combat

• Action

• Transformation.

During the combat phase, the player fights the adventurers with combat cards. Should the player win, the adventurer card is \"consumed\" and may later be used to purchase mutations. Should the player be defeated, his/her slime is removed from the game and regenerates in the next turn. Other players may also raise the combat difficulties when certain conditions are met.

During the action phase, the player may move his/her own slime, the adventurer decks or purchase the revealed mutation cards by spending adventurer cards.

During the transformation phase, the player may discard and refill the cards in his/her hand.

The game ends whenever

• a player accumulates six mutation cards

• less than 4 adventurers remain at the end of any player\'s turn.

In the former situation, the player with six mutation cards wins. In the later situation, the winner is

decided based on the mutations each player has and the adventurers they defeated.

The Game Design

The slime adventure is a party game that is easy to learn. However, it also enjoys a satisfactory strategy depth by employing a system where the card placement opens up many different options for the players. Similar to many other games in this genre, one can win either by focusing on progressing toward the victory condition or denying other players. The random components play a huge role in this game, as it should. However, players are not knocked out of the game before the game ends. Hence, \"poor hands\" are more bearable. Overall, the slime adventure is quite fun and contains quite some humorous JRPG references. If you like both card games and JRPG, you might want to check this game out.