by: Michael Barnes

In many American-style adventure games, theme and narrative are conveyed through hundreds of flavor text-laden cards, elaborate illustrations, and every now and then core mechanics. Mousquetaires du Roy, a new co-op adventure title from a rather unexpected transatlantic pair of publishers more renowned for hardline Eurogames such as Caylus, bucks this trend. The game offers one to five players a surprisingly thorough précis of Alexander Dumas’ serialized novel The Three Musketeers with a fraction of the components and purple prose that tends to characterize the genre.

Up to four players take on the roles of swashbucklers Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’artagnan. Each has a special advantage keyed directly to the source material as well as a set of statistics that meter the character’s Gallantry, Erudition, Nobility, and Panache. Strength and dexterity are non-issues. All for one and one for all, the Musketeers must work together to thwart the schemes of Cardinal Richelieu and his notoriously felonious enforcer, Milady de Winter. The fifth player controls Milady, secretly moving between locations to thwart our heroes’ actions and placing traps and duelists to guard plots from their meddling.

Systems are fairly simple and clearly show the influence of past co-op games, ranging from Knizia’s classic Lord of the Rings game from 1999 to Shadows Over Camelot. Most tasks, whether it’s defending the Queen’s honor by silencing hecklers or protecting D’artagnan’s beloved Constance in Paris are skill checks wherein a player must play a number of iconic cards in addition to their rating to beat them. Combat, whether it’s between one of Milady’s henchman or her escort Rochefort, is a Heroquest-derived binary system leveraging specialized dice with swords and shields. Swords hit, shields block, and if a character matches a particular result with a prescribed “special move”, it’s an instant kill combo. Purchasable equipment imparts automatic shields or swords in combat.

Milady can win the game through several means, principally by completing tracks to discredit the Queen at Versailles or to successfully strike at Constance. There is also an ongoing battle at La Rochelle, where Richelieu’s forces are laying siege to Huguenot forces. If the Protestants fall, the Musketeers lose. The Musketeers can add cards to influence an end-of-turn die roll that shifts a differential slider toward one side of the conflict or the other. Milady can also do the same, which leads to some tense and contested roll-offs. Many endgame conditions hinge on do-or-die dice-offs, which leads to dramatic and exciting conclusions.

The Musketeer’s primary objective is to complete a series of four sequential story cards that hit the high points of the story regarding the return of the Queen’s jewels from the Duke of Buckingham in England. Each card allows the Milady player to place opposition forces and other traps, and the Musketeers must gather strength by way of cards and equipment to make it through the gauntlet—while also mitigating crises on other parts of the board. This can be a very challenging game for the Musketeer player, with every decision counting and close collusion essential to victory against a competent Milady player.

This is a fun game that really sells its setting and narrative without a lot of rules overhead or silly prose, but there are a couple of issues mostly centered on the rules and their translation. The rulebook, to put it mildly, is terrible. Its organization is a disaster and after my first reading of it I had no idea about how to play the game or even how it was really structured. Strategy tips and a setup sheet explain more than the procedural description does. To make matters worse, there are conflicting terms and inconsistent usage problems- are they “Treachery” cards or “Perfidy” cards? And there is sometimes not a clear distinction if a card that says “lose one pistol” means one of the equipment firearms or a pistol, the unit of currency. The poor editing and translation reminds me of playing Eurogames in the mid-1990s with some amateur translated rules pulled off of the Internet.