Some games arrive on your table in enormous boxes bursting with potential, metal coins, miniatures and rulebooks so thick you’ll have to take them to bed for a week just to find time to read them. Then along comes Mi Cielo, designed by Carlos A. Machado and published by Scrungo Games, which arrives in a box small enough to disappear in my bag and yet also somehow looks like it has been in my bag for a month when it arrived.
I have very different feelings about Mi Cielo. On one hand, it has a quality that screams bargain bin. On the other hand, it is mechanically very good. I want to say brilliant, but what would put it into my mechanically beautiful bucket is equally what can be its enemy.
Mi Cielo is essentially a game about birds trying to outmanoeuvre each other. The birds are floating around on balloons in the clouds. So already the theme lost me as it does nothing for me which may work for some people, but never really gave me a reason to care.
Every game starts with a small number of cards laid out in a set pattern. With two red balloons on one side, two yellow balloons on the other, and some basic, non aligned cards in the middle with spaces between them.
On your turn you can do one of two things. You can either place a new sky card and draw another (if there are any left in the small draw pile), or you can move one of your birds by hopping onto a connected balloon that matches your colour.
So, this is where you would be forgiven for asking “is that it?” and it kind of is. But, this is where I think that Mi Cielo shows what I really love. First of all, you can play your new cards outside the starting play area, which opens up some possibilities. My opponent didn’t click the tactics I was doing as I did that for the first time. Its just a shame that the drawer deck is so small, you can’t do a lot with this.
You can play your cards on top of other cards, as long as they don’t have birds printed on them basically. Then comes the moving your bird action. You can move to a connected card that has your balloon colour on. Most of those cards have clouds printed on them, and each cloud will point in different sets of directions. When your bird jumps to a card, every card in the direction of its clouds flip. If a bird is on the cards you flip, they return to one of the starting cards of the other player. They get to choose.
This is the best part of the game, the idea of opening new routes, closing them, and messing with your opponent is very well done. I thought at first that I might compare it to Chess, but its more like Draughts to me. Every move you make changes the landscape, meaning you constantly have to think one or two turns ahead. I kept saying to my partner when she or I didn’t know what to do next, sometimes you just have to “shake the tree” to then see what the other player does, and that might then give you a plan.
Victory in Mi Cielo comes either by getting both of your birds onto your opponents’ starting balloons, or by completely blocking them so they can’t move their birds or play a card. I can imagine that happening, but not often.
Now, Mi Cielo can bring full on analysis paralysis amongst players. I do not struggle with decisions generally with this type of game, I might have a heavy euro, but not something small like this. But other players can be daunted by the possibilities. I would often be looking at my opponents choices and would be thinking “you have three choices” and I could see their most obvious aggressive move, their obvious defensive move and then the third bucket of “just whatever”. I started to feel after a while that the decision process in Mi Cielo was closer to Noughts and Crosses, and that’s maybe when my enthusiasm for Mi Cielo began to drop from the sky.
So, beside the fact that the product theme and quality is so poor I might have assumed Mi Cielo came free with a magazine, the rule book is so painfully rubbish. We had so many niggling questions that the tiny rule book didn’t cover. But it’s ok, you might say, as in the rule book, there is a QR code to a “2nd edition rulebook” that no matter what I did, all my different devices and computers went “yeah, we are blocking this site as it’s suspicious as heck, sorry human father”. And with the kind of work I do in my normal life, I trust the tech I have that tells me this. Not exactly confidence inspiring.
The other major gripe I have with Mi Cielo is that it says that the game will play in ten to twenty minutes. That sound you can hear is very much me laughing in British. It took us just short of an hour to play one game, but your mileage may vary if both players are aggressive. I dread to think if two defensive players go against one another. The problem was, I play these types of games aggressively, but my opponent plays things defensively. Mi Cielo makes it VERY easy to block the other player, especially if they have locked in one bird already, you can just keep using your two birds to block theirs. It makes it extremely difficult for you to win, but it also means they are not likely to get their second bird through.
So yes, mechanically I thought Mi Cielo was stunning, even if the production quality simply does not match how clever the game underneath it actually is. And with an instruction booklet that was written once and then only proofread by people who made the game so already had all the rules rattling around in their brain cases. If someone else owns a copy, absolutely give it a try. You’ll probably admire the elegance of its mechanics just as much as I did. The problem is that admiration and enjoyment aren’t always the same thing. As soon as Mi Cielo started reminding me of Noughts and Crosses, my mind immediately went to WarGames. And by the end, I found myself agreeing with WOPR: “a strange game. The only winning move is not to play”
You can find out more about Mi Ceilo on the website of publisher Scrungo Games.
