Infinity Wilderness of Mirrors Deck, review

This was originally written for The British Fantasy Society.

Published by Modiphius, Wilderness of Mirrors is a great name for describing a component of the Infinity role-playing game. This deck capitalizes on a quirk that gives Infinity a sense of having layers. Individual player characters can have objectives that they’ll need to pursue, but these goals can conflict with others in the group, and even put them at odds with each other.

Mechanics that pit player against player can feel hard to implement. While a good game has tension, it’s generally not for the best to set the PCs against one another too much. This deck helps alleviate some of the complications surrounding that by offering a wide variety of prompts, although adding some more specific locations, or direct confrontations with rivals would have made it a little bit better.

That being said, this deck needed an extra card that would serve as a set of instructions. There are a lot of different things available here, from relatively simple objectives, “A journalist is delving a little too deeply. Warn them off and let them know why”, or can be fairly complicated, such as, “Corrupt a person of influence and arrange a meeting with your handler.”  If people are inexperienced with the game the deck might be a little overwhelming. 

Also, while the cards are easy to read, they resemble ones from the board game, Trivial Pursuit. The design works and is easy to understand, but the capable team at Modiphius could have come up with something a bit more unique.  

If you’re in a pinch and want to add complexity to your games, these cards are great. There’s no prep required, just the deck. Simply grab a few at random, and you’re off! It might even be fun to let players draw cards blindly, and just go with those. The cards are easy to read and fit the game well. It’s a shame they don’t have a more unique design, but the layout of the cards is simple enough. These cards are by no means a necessary product to own, but if you’re the type of player that likes to cut out prep time, then these might be for you.