Minos: Dawn of the Bronze Age is the latest exciting game to come from Board&Dice and designer Stan Kordonskiy who is known for the likes of Endless Winter (Fantasia Games) and Nova Roma (Queen Games).
In Minos, you take the role of a leader of a Minoan clan in charge of the first European civilization. You will be building cities, monuments and other structures, opening new trade routes, expanding and fighting off outsiders, planning your actions with your clan council, researching, and issuing decrees so your actions will be more powerful than your opponents. You have only four rounds to prove you are worthy of the legendary Minos title.
Board&Dice are best known for their heavy eurogames and Minos doesn’t disappoint in that, but despite being a heavyweight game it plays remarkably smoothly. I will say now that this game's production value must be praised. The retail copy comes with unique meeples, dual-layered boards, multiple good-quality pieces, superb artwork with clear symbology, and a very well written rulebook.
The game is played over four rounds, with scoring after the rounds 2 and 4. Each round follows the same format, with the bulk of the decision space being during the first part of the round: the Draft and Place Dice phase. You roll all the dice and sort them by their value and then each player must select a die, place it in one of their die containers, and then put the die container on an action space. There are five action spaces, and all have equal use and value depending on what your strategy is. This phase is where Minos shines and shows a clever mechanic: you are drafting the dice with multiple things in mind... Firstly you want high numbers because if you can combine dice together to score 9 or higher of the same colour you will be able to advance up one of the three tracks, which you want to do, but also at the same time you want lower numbers because they give you better access to the action spaces... Every person that I have taught this game to has loved this part of the game and found it engaging and thought-provoking.
Once the Dice Drafting phase is resolved and players have moved up the associated tracks, you then get into the main bulk of the game - taking actions. Players take turns retrieving their dice from the container with the highest-valued die. Again this is a simple yet interesting mechanic that you have to be mindful of while drafting. You cannot take actions as you please; you must play them out based on the highest number. The main actions are drawing new decree cards, playing decree cards, constructing new buildings, moving your soldiers around the board and a wild action space that lets you mimic the other actions. The decree cards are a big part of this game and lean towards a large part of its engine-building element. At the end of the round, during the Income and Clean-up phase, you can tuck these cards under your player board 'Palace' in order to trigger bonus actions based on dice drafting choices and the action spaces chosen.
Minos offers players plenty of interesting decisions and powerful combo tactic choices. Every action moves your engine forward and like many 'point salad' games you're given many ways to score points. The teaching of the game can be long, due to the multiple rules and the need to explain the flow of the game, but once play is underway players quickly grasp the rhythm of the game. Every player I have taught this to has finished the game enjoying it and is keen to get it back to the table.
The one downside is the game's propensity to induce AP (Analysis Paralysis) in players due to the multiple paths to victory and decision spaces. With that in mind, Minos plays best with three players; a four-player game could well take 3 hours to play. Despite this, I still highly rate Minos, and think it is one of the outstanding eurogames to be released last year.
(Review by David Breaker)