I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.

I was going to go to a BBQ today, but my kids are sick, so instead I decided to read Mausritter. Mausritter, by Isaac Williams, is a free fantasy adventure game where you play teensie tiny mice, doing teensie tiny things in a huge and dangerous world, full of magic. I’ve never read, watched or played any of the animal fantasies in the acknowledgements section, so I’m not sure exactly what it’s vibing off. I read Duncton Wood and its sequels as a girl, but they’re about moles — totally different vibe from mice. I’m not reviewing the free adventure, though, because I was lucky enough to snag the boxed set directly from the author (who’s relatively local, and had a spare copy in his garage), and in addition, I’m going to read the Estate, the second Mausritter boxed set. These two boxed sets are what I’m reviewing (because I only understood Mausritter after I read them together), but I’ll talk about the free version too.

Cutting to the chase: Mausritter (plus the Estate) is the best game I’ve ever bought. It might be the best game I’ve ever played (that’s a complex beast). It is nigh perfect. It is a better fantasy adventure game in the style of D&D than any game that has ever been called D&D, and any game that has attempted to better it before. The reasons for that are multifaceted, and I’m saying things as a collection: For me, Mausritter and the Estate should be considered as essential purchases for the understanding of each other as the Dungeon Masters Guide and the Monster Manual are for most editions of D&D.

The rulebook is 44 pages, and only 12 pages of those are the actual game rules. And those rules are basically just Knave but More. Why isn’t Knave the best game I’ve ever played, then? Maybe it’s in the extra pages? No, but they help. The additional 24 pages are one of the best how to run a fantasy adventure game sections I’ve ever read, covering best practices, a bestiary, how to build a hex crawl (including settlements) and how to build adventure sites. Those 24 A5 pages are a better guide to running a game in this style than anything I’ve read, aside from perhaps the Mothership 1e’s Warden’s Guide. But you know what? I’ve been playing these games since 1993, is there anything in this rule book that’s new? Nah, not really. It’s masterfully put together, it excises any chaff, but there’s nothing at all here, I think that’s actually new.

The internal art is cute and thematic. I don’t think it could be better, for the theme. The manual itself is waaaay too dense, and could easily have been spread over a few more pages and given space to breathe. It’s not hard to find your way around, but it’s not easy. It’s not laid out excessively, though, perhaps to its detriment: The blackletter font choice is a little hard to read at small sizes, and those headings could have benefited from a third font choice. It would have made the current blackletter headings easier to differentiate, I think, as it’s overused. It’s supposed to be simple enough to remember, I think. It’s not far off, but a lot of the tables could be pulled out and put in a rules reference instea — wait, no, they thought of that. Everything you want is pulled out into a rules reference in the back.

You don’t really need the book. In fact, if you have any experience running games like this, you could run this game from the rules reference. It even includes an example hex crawl and adventure site, which you can just use to start playing immediately. If you don’t need the book, and the book’s not that innovative, why is this such a good game? Well, let’s open the box…the first thing I see is that a lot of my complaints of the digital layout don’t apply to the print copy. It’s a hardcover A5 book, with a window in the front of it, peering through a tree hollow into a view of an exploring mouse. The text is so much more readable in print than in digital. It feels lovely and cool in my hands, and it smells like fresh bookery. It’ll last a lot of play. Next, a pad of character sheets: Ahhh, characters are dispensable. Good to know. They’re illustrated and simple as; you can see it’s easy to play this game. There’s a cardboard tracker, with a wipeable marker, to render travel easier and to keep notes on the player mice if you’re the referee; this game isn’t centered around combat, but around travel. Huh, interesting. There’s a referee screen, with every piece of information that felt crammed into the text given space and arranged logically. The art on the back of the referee screen is full colour, gorgeous, in the style of Wind in the Willows, or at least what I’ve seen on covers of those books. There’s a rules reference to sit with the players, as well. And there are pages and pages of punchcards: These are spells, magical items, they’re items, and they’re conditions. You place these on your character sheet, you don’t write on it. You play tetris with them. There’s something lovely and nostalgic for me, with punching cards, like we used to in wargames that came in envelopes in the 90s. Mausritter is so damned tactile.

It comes with a module, as well. Honey in the Rafters is a single-colour, trifold, with A5 pages. Its single colour is yellow — that becomes important later — and it’s fully illustrated. Everything for the module fits here — stat blocks, a keyed map, hooks, treasures, random encounters and a summary, as well as a “cover”. Between this and the stuff in the rule book, you’ve got tools to play for a long time.

But! You cry, We’ll lose all the items inbetween sessions! That’s so annoying! Yeah it is, unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about tha —We come to the Estate. The Estate is the apparently optional second boxed set from the Mausritter team. The box is lovely, full colour, a view of the Estate within. Wait, did I mention that the Mausritter box was sturdy, just big enough to fit an A5 book and hence, just big enough to fit on a bookshelf with your other roleplaying game books, and also full-coloured and gorgeous with unique art? It was. So is the Estate’s box. I open it and… oh! Will you look at that? Little paper backpacks, to keep all of your equipment in. And more punchcards, for all the unique equipment and conditions in the Estate! And…wait, I thought this was an adventure location? Where’s the book?

Spoiler alert: There is no book. Instead, there are eleven (why eleven? strange number choice) single colour A5 trifolds. Not one of them is yellow, but they’re all unique colours otherwise. Oh, right. There are twelve: The twelfth was in the first boxed set. It also comes with a reference card to assist with running a race that occurs in one of these trifolds, a big A3 poster map of the entire estate to sit on your table, and a 6 page zine that pulls it all together (that was actually at the top of the box, I lied earlier for the sake of the segue).

What we have here is a 19 hex hex-crawl, with 11 adventuring locations, 5 settlements, 4 major factions, and a boatload of connections. Each of those adventuring locations gets its own card, and would take a session or two to run. They’re written by a veritable who’s who of module writing, people like Amanda Lee Franck, Diogo Nogueira, and Nat Treme. Each and every one of them is excellent, but acts within the same limited format of the aforementioned Honey in the Rafters. They each have a number of connections, so you’ll be pulled from one adventuring location to another. They are, by design, brief and minimal: The design brief here was clearly keep it simple and the result is that I could give these to my 5 year old to run. Does it mean they’re as robust as they could be? No. But they’re beautiful and usable.

Have I answered why this is the best game I’ve ever bought? It might seem like I had, but actually I haven’t. I’ve just told you a lot about how close it is to perfect. It’s a well put together game, perhaps the best put together I’ve ever seen. It’s better than the Pathfinder and D&D 5th Edition boxed sets, with all the money that goes into them, and in addition it contains all the rules and if you get the Estate, play for a year. So…why then?

First, I’ll talk about the counterargument. I bounced off Mausritter and hard when I read the pdf many years ago. It’s better, now, and the boxed set is better again, but it wasn’t the rules that I bounced off, it was the setting. I didn’t quite understand the particular melange it presented of classic, low-fantasy dungeon-crawling and English countryside talking animal-land. I couldn’t picture what play would look like. What’s a car in this scenario? What happens when we finally confront a human? I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I didn’t know what a session would look like. I could see the rules as elegant ones, but my thoughts were more: Let’s take this cool Knave hack and hack it back into classic fantasy, because I don’t get the mice. It took the Estate for me to get the mice. To understand how cats in this world are dragons (I should’ve gotten that from the manual, but I didn’t), that owls are wizards and frogs are goofy knights. That I could just decide to make the world work the way I chose. That a mouse could be corrupted, perhaps, by a gluttonous centipede, but that they could as easily be tricked by a vanilla faerie. You might feel the same way: You might not get the mice.

Stop rambling, you cry, why, then, is this the best game you’ve ever bought, and perhaps played? It’s the mice. Those very mice I didn’t get until I laid my hands on the Estate: Those mice. The classic mode of play of the fantasy adventure game — the you’ll see me talking about people like Gus L trying to rehabilitate, and with success in my opinion — is one where your player characters are weak, and the world is dark and dangerous, and where caution is necessary. Not necessarily the grim dark we see in many takes on classic play, but cautious and dangerous, and gleeful in the havok and clever avoidance of death. And when my friends with their experiences of World of Warcraft, Skyrim, and the Lord of the Rings movies show up with their tiefling warlocks and dragonborn paladins, they charge in, die, and get upset. And fair enough. A demon-fathered spellcaster and a paladin who’s part dragon himself should be able to stand toe-to-toe with a dragon. They’re clearly, clearly playing superheroes. But as my friend Warren of Prismatic Wasteland once said: No mouse can stand toe-to-toe with a dragon. Everyone knows this. There’s no question that if you’re a mouse, and you come up against the dragon, you’re a fool if you go toe-to-toe with it. And thus, Mausritter is the purest and most perfect distillation of what Dungeons and Dragons in its classic mode, is supposed to feel like. You don’t have to teach anyone a new (old) style of play. “You’re a mouse, with a needle for a sword, in a dangerous world” is shorthand for it.

I haven’t yet mentioned the community yet, either. here are, at a cursory glance, translations into seven languages. There’re random online generators and VTT modules. Printable templates of everything for free if you run out of what’s in the boxed set or they get destroyed or overloved. There’s a Mausritter Library of hundreds of supplements, bestiaries, and adventures. There’s a collaborative megadungeon called Tomb of a Thousand Doors that was built on the Mausritter discord, on Kickstarter right now, that looks wild and has raised $100 000. And that discord is booming. There’s support behind this game unlike any other indie elfgame I’ve seen. Honestly, the community seems more passionate even than the Mothership crowd. If you choose to wade into this pool, you won’t be alone in the water.

I wouldn’t recommend you download the free version of Mausritter, because if you do, I suspect you’ll have the same response as I do, unless you’re intimately familiar with the texts that inspired it. But with both the Mausritter and Estate boxed sets in hand, this is perfect. I’ll play with my children when they’re old enough (very soon now!), long before I suggest playing my own Cairn or Old School Essentials or my own Advanced Fantasy Dungeons, let alone actual D&D of any edition. I want this perfect game to be their first experience of the hobby. I couldn’t think of a more perfect gift.

Idle Cartulary