Let's go back to the Bronze Age

Let's go back to the Bronze Age

We’ve had two colorful nature themed games from Board & Dice this year which are beautiful and fun, but I was happy to see them return to their staple ancient history theme for their 3rd big release of the year. 😊 This is 🏛️Minos: Dawn of the Bronze Age which is a mid-heavy euro about the Minoan civilization. 😮

The action selection is definitely the number one thing that has to be mentioned. 🙂 It is dice drafting 🎲, but there are multiple layers to it. Players pick dice in turn order one at a time and place them on action spots using little dice holders to mark who took which dice. Nothing unusual so far, but now it gets intriguing as dice values matter a lot! 😁

Dice with smaller values can push back higher values, which is important as actions are stronger in the front slots - ☝️ you can’t completely push out dice however; if an action is filled up, no more dice can go there.

However, you also want to draft high value dice, as after drafting you can make virtual groups of same-colored dice with values of 9+ to advance on the three tracks of the game. 📊 These tracks provide you with income and many useful effects.

🧐Lastly, values also matter because when you start executing actions (until now it was only a planning phase), you have to activate the action first where your highest die is. This makes planning really interesting as you usually want to do some actions before others.

The other big part of the game are the cards. 🃏 You play these for an immediate effect, but more importantly they can later be tucked under your board for passive bonuses. They’ll activate when you do the depicted action or use the depicted die value, so there is a big emphasis on engine building! 😉

The game also scales wonderfully with player count, with two board-sides for 2-3 and 4 players, and with extra overlay tiles for 2p games. 👍 Of course it’s all pretty zero-sum with 2 players but it is very good - even though we had fears about this player count at first. Minos actually surprised us in a very positive way. It’s much more fun than we expected. 🥰