Matthew Bailey
On the fifth day of Christmas
My children played with me…
Five raised bannerrrrs!
Four wild rebounds…
Three perfect dishes…
Two risky predictions…
And a monster as big as a tree.
Muster: Raise the Banners only landed on my table a few days ago, but I had to make space and include it in my 12 Days of Christmas, largely because Muster is one of the best simple head-to-head card games I have played in a long time.
Normally, when you play two-player head-to-head card games, they involve some sort of engine building or are usually a bit more complex. Muster, by contrast, is really simple but really engaging, and just an absolute joy to play.
At its core, Muster is all about fighting for control of five castles laid out between the two players. Each castle represents a different faction, and on your side of the board you are building stacks of banner cards beneath each one, trying to get more points than your opponent with the aim of winning at least three out of the five castles. The clever part is that you are not simply adding cards whenever you feel like it. Every banner has a strength value, and cards must be played in numerical order, which immediately makes every decision feel tight and considered. Do you slowly build up from a 1, or do you put a 3 down first so you can reach the higher numbers faster, but risk ending up with lower cards you cannot lay later?
On your turn, you take one action, and most of the time that action will be playing a banner from your hand under a matching castle. You can only place a card if its strength is equal to or higher than the one already there, and it can only be one strength higher at most. That simple restriction does a lot of heavy lifting. It stops runaway leads, forces you to think ahead about hand management, and means that sometimes the card you want to play is useless until you engineer the board into the right state.
Where the game really starts to sing, though, is with the rainbow cards. Rainbow Wizards are wild and can be played under any castle, on top of any strength, giving you a flexible way to swing momentum at exactly the right moment. Rainbow Bridges, on the other hand, let you skip missing numbers in a strength sequence, effectively cheating your way up the ladder when you do not have the perfect card in hand. These cards are powerful, but they are not free wins, and using them at the wrong time can leave you wide open to a counterplay, and they also do not gain you any points. The game only lasts as long as the deck of cards, which is not that long, so the game has a very finite end. All of a sudden, you will find you only have two turns left and your master plan is not going to get finished, so you have to go into best-case-scenario mode. It is really compelling.
There is also a shared layer of interaction happening on the castles themselves. Cards can be played directly onto the central castle spaces, and if a rainbow card is played it changes which banners are allowed underneath. Those cards can later be drawn by either player. Add in the ability to swap rainbow cards back out with correctly played banners, and suddenly what looks like a very straightforward head-to-head card game becomes a constant push and pull. As the game ends as soon as the deck runs out, and whoever controls the most castles wins, every single action feels meaningful right up until the final draw. At no point did we feel like we were just trading cards back and forth or cycling turns, as there really are not enough turns for that to happen.
The components are simple yet lovely. The artwork on the cards is wonderful, and everything is produced to a very high standard. It is also nice to have a board, as so often with these types of card games the board is a deluxe extra. When playing games with kids, it is so much better to have a tangible board to play on.
There is definitely an element of luck when it comes to the draw, but this can be managed and mitigated with intelligent gameplay, and it does not take away from the experience.
We played several games of this in a row because we enjoyed it so much, and it is going to be a strong contender for future 1v1 game nights.
I only wish I had got hold of this a few weeks ago, as it almost certainly would have made it into our Games of the Year list.
Muster: Raise the Banners is a very simple yet wonderfully engaging and tactical two-player game that I cannot recommend strongly enough if you often find yourself playing games with just two.
Excellent stuff.
Disclaimer: A copy of Muster was kindly gifted to me by @playmonkeygames. No incentive has been given for a positive review.
