by Elstree
For years now I've been on a quest for the perfect dungeon crawl. "Perfect" in this sense means that it comes as close as possible to my nostalgic memories of playing D&D with my brother as a kid. I'd begun to despair that such a thing actually existed. Most dungeon crawls I played were really just tactical miniature games of varying complexity with a single paragraph of flavor text bookending the scenario details before and after.Mice and Mystics is the first and only boardgame I've played that actually captures that feeling of playing an RPG, and it's all because the STORY (and yes, that deserves to be in all-caps) is central to the game. Unlike games like Descent (1e) where your character is a hollow set of attributes and combat feels abstracted and divorced from the plot, in Mice and Mystics you are playing a real character you identify with, and combat has meaning because it relates directly to the goals of the story.
Disclaimer: I was a playtester for the game so I may not be entirely unbiased. However I think it says something that I begged for that role after demoing a prototype of the game at GenCon a couple of years ago. Even in its rough-draft form the game was that good.