The best Egyptian-themed euro?

We bought 🏺 Men-Nefer at SPIEL24, but somehow it took us 6 months to finally get it to the table. 🙈 We’ve played a few games by designer German P. Millan: Bitoku was pretty good, Sabika is amazing, but Amritsar kind of fell short (in spite of an awesome rondel-mancala action selection), so I wasn’t sure what to expect from Men-Nefer. 
Luckily, this game is brilliant! 🥳

I’m a fan of Egyptian themes in gaming, and with Men-Nefer you get a huge dose of it. A big board (I’d say too big actually) with pyramids you can build and loads of colorful screen printed tokens for sarcophagi, sphinxes and much much more. 🤩 The table presence is truly remarkable.

I’d classify this as a mid-heavy euro, though it looks more daunting than it actually is. At least we managed to learn the ropes pretty quickly. That said, some turns can definitely lead to analysis paralysis.  😄

The action selection is interesting: basically you have 3 workers each with an action scroll.
🕋You can use an action scroll for its effect by discarding it and placing the corresponding worker to 1 of 5 locations (not activating it yet!)
🕋You can specialize a worker already at a location, to do the action there. After each use, the actions become stronger, so it is worth it to concentrate on a few action types.
🕋You can draft new action scrolls for the next round if already have an empty space on your player board, which gains you a bonus too.

So basically you do 9 turns each round: 🧐 sending out 3 workers, specialising them and refilling empty action scroll slots. This all works very smoothly. There are always multiple ways to do things, so even though resources are tight, you always have options. There is no worker blocking, but you have to pay with food for other workers present, so timing is important, and you might have to pivot a few times. As there are 5 main action types but only 3 workers, you always feel like you can try new things in subsequent games. 

Men-Nefer is a true point salad, which I personally love. 👍 Pretty much everything you do earns points somehow at the end of each round. The key is figuring out the most efficient combo of actions to come out ahead! 😉