A Guide to Mage Knight Plus (Highly Scripted):

Mod currently maintained by Tuff-Luck

Guide written by babushkasara

Steam Workshop Link

Mage Knight Designed by Vlaada Chvátil with Art by J.Lonnee

Published by Wiz Kids Games

Starting a Game – New Players

Once you’ve downloaded the mod, launched TTS, and clicked load, your computer
might have a moment. DON’T PANIC! Give it a sec and you’ll see this setup splash
screen:

If you are brand-new to Mage Knight, first of all, welcome. This is a great game and a
great mod for playing it. Secondly though, click “I’m a new player and want the
Walkthrough Scenario” button at the top.

Continue to NOT PANIC.

Your camera should now be centered on the Game Walkthrough document. I
recommend carrying it over closer to your play space as you will be following it step-by-
step as you explore the realm and encounter new mechanics. To page through it, right
click, mouse over ‘States’ and select the number of the page you wish to view. The
Page Up and Page Down keys also work.

At the bottom of the screen should be 5 cards. This is your hand. You can hide/show
the bottom-of-screen display by pressing the ‘H’ key. While we’re at it, don’t forget
pressing the ‘?’ key will pull up Tabletop Simulator’s keybind/control reference.
Regardless, your hand is always visible down by your play area where your Steam
name is printed.

In the top left corner are two buttons: Score and Help. Score won’t mean much until
you’ve worked through the Game Walkthrough but will prove very handy in future
games. Clicking Help toggles some of the grey information boxes located around the
screen as well as the floating text. Directly underneath Score/Help is a summary of the
Scenario settings. If you’re playing the Walkthrough Scenario, it should look something
like this:

To go through this briefly, this box is informing us that we are playing the First
Reconnaissance scenario (the one used in the Walkthrough), all the non-character
content from the two expansions has been excluded, the map is the default layout for
the scenario, and any cities we find (all 1 of them) will be friendly. In future games, this
is a quick reminder of what game settings were chosen from the splash screen at the
beginning.

Also at the top, we see that 30deg rotation is ideal – click on the number next to the little
weightlifting man to cycle through rotation values until you find 30 – and a little
information on how to play multi-handed – definitely not something you should be
worrying about on your first play.

Directly on top of your play area is an explanation of how the mod handles end-of-turn
clean up, but we’ll go through that a bit later.

These help boxes go away after tactic selection is complete or can be toggled with the
help button. Two boxes *won’t* go away. First, there will be a message in the middle:
“[Mage Knight name] needs to choose a tactic from the center”. That’ll make sense
once you’ve read to page 7 of the Game Walkthrough. Notices like this will happen
periodically through the game whenever the mod needs your input on something before
it can proceed.

The other box is the large grey one in the bottom right. This is the control center of the
mod and displays key information as well as allowing you to interface with certain
aspects of the game.

At the top is some general information: the scenario, whose turn it is, and the reputation
and fame values of the active player. Below that, in order, are ways for you to manually
adjust your hand size, draw one card, manually adjust your end-of-turn fame and
reputation gain, end your turn, or call end of round. Note that for Norowas here, End
Turn and Call End of Round are both greyed out. That’s because you must always
either play at least one card or discard at least one card on your turn. You are not
allowed to do nothing. Norowas likewise cannot call end of round because he still has
cards in his Deed deck. Again, the Game Walkthrough will explain all this from a game
mechanics standpoint. Page 18 in this case.

Say I’ve played a card and clicked End Turn. Now the grey box changes. It’s asking me
some contextual questions based on where my character standee is located. Common
ones include placing victory shields that mark which Mage Knight ‘did the thing’ at a
location and adjusting your hand size if you are able to gain the benefits of nearby
Keeps. Others might be reminders to throw away wounds at Magical Glades, reward
notifications if you plundered an adventure site, or level up reminders if your fame
crossed a level threshold. These are just reminder questions. The rules and site
reference cards should be consulted for the proper actions. Once you’re done ending
your turn, click ‘Rewards Claimed’ and it’s on to the next player. Unless the game just
ended, of course, in which case you should click ‘Scenario End Achieved?’ to allow all
human players one last turn.

Starting a Game – Experienced Players

When you load up the mod, you’re faced with this setup menu. The right-hand panel
does a pretty good job of explaining the options, but there are some things that could be
further clarified.

Earlier chosen, lower numbered settings tend to overrule the later, higher numbered
ones. For example, if you select your Mage Knight and then change which scenario you
have selected, your choice of Mage Knight will be reset.

The “2nd Position Mage Knight” (the white player color seat) is the ideal spot if playing
solo due to its central location. Highly recommended. As for the settings, sometimes
‘Blitz’ will be colored red. This generally means it’s either auto-toggled due to the
scenario selection or not recommended for the scenario selection. ‘Remove Lost Legion
Expansion’/’Shades of Tezla Monsters’ removes/adds, respectively, the monsters from
those expansions. ‘Rampage!’ and ‘More Rampage!’ are mutually exclusive intensity
levels of the same thing. ‘Start at Night’ changes ‘Darkness is Coming’ to ‘Daylight is
Coming’. ‘Start at a Higher Level’ will present a whole new menu after the game is
started for you to process your preemptive level-ups. Ymirgh is a fan-made Mage Knight
while ‘Atlantean Weather’ and ‘Quest Cards’ are fan-made mini-expansions whose rules
will be found in the top right of the table if selected.

Once some aspects of your game are chosen, you’ll have the opportunity to modify the
scenario specifics - game length, map shape, city levels, etc.

Once you’re ready, hit start and let the mod do its thing.

The Play Area

The mod will automatically process your end-of-turn clean up according to the
description shown by the Help box on your play area. Any face-up cards will be
collected into your discard pile while face-down cards will be deleted from the game.
Crystals and tokens will poof so if they are actually crystals and you didn’t use them,
store them in your inventory space under your Mage Knight’s portrait. Any dice you
used will be automatically rerolled and returned. [Note: if you use empowered Mana
Draw to set a die to a specific face, manually return it to the Source so it won’t be
rerolled.] Any skills you had dragged around will be returned to their spots. Any face-up
monsters will affect your fame and/or reputation as displayed on the control panel and
then move to the discards by the Fame Board. Because of this, if you do not defeat a
monster or don’t earn its fame reward for some reason, like from the minion of an Orc
Summoner, don’t leave it face-up. Instead, note that face-down monster tokens will be
returned to whence they came.

Other areas of the play space may be of interest. Each player has six infinite bags of
mana crystals/tokens for easy access. You’ve also got infinite shields for tracking
accomplishments, infinite marker tokens for marking whatever needs marking (useful in
multiplayer), and infinite wounds for when, like me, you decide that blocking is for losers
and need to take 8 of them. On the other side are handy tokens for indicating if your
units have been wounded and for keeping track of how many keeps you’ve conquered.
On the bottom left are your skill token cheat sheets for reference purposes but all skill
tokens in this game have their abilities included as tooltips.
In other news, did you know the character models are TUBULAR and you can just drop
the victory shields through them without having to move the model to place them? The
models have two other states for your viewing pleasure as well: Flatmage
McPancakeKnight and Standee McGee.

Oh No! Something Broke!

Sometimes you’ll try to do a thing and the mod will say ‘no, I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t
do that thing’. Sometimes, you can, in fact, do the thing and you’ll have to ignore the
mod’s warnings. Sometimes, to do so would be cheating and a most heinous crime. For
example: Core tiles aren’t supposed to be placed along the coastlines, but sometimes
you just *really* don’t want to walk all the way over there. In those cases, you may have
to manually populate the tiles.

Other times, the mod might do things in such a way that the results aren't quite what
you expected. For example, your reputation might not be where you thought it was
supposed to be or applying a skill might require some manual adjustments.

In these cases, you have a few options. One is to quit the game, throw your computer
out the window, and begin your transition to life as an avocado farmer. Alternatively, you
can continue playing and just manually do the things the mod is having difficulties with.

A common hang-up for the mod relates to Tactics cards because they involve so many
moving parts. If a Tactics card issue happens, there are spare Tactics cards located at
the top left of the table so you can continue your game.

Keep in mind that the mod knows the rules to the game and expects the players to be
interacting with it according to those rules. If things continue to not function as expected,
make sure it’s not in fact you who are the mistaken one.

The most important thing is to provide feedback. Post a comment on the mod’s page of
the Steam Workshop so Tuff-Luck is aware of the issue. Try to be detailed in describing
what you were trying to do and what resulted instead. If you recognize that your
experience was a truly baffling example of mod behavior, being able to provide a copy
of your save might help track down the bugs.