Share and share alike

In the game of Skymines players take on the roles of investors. Four competing businesses have the rights to mine resources from the moon (or asteroids on the reverse side of the board), and by investing in shares in these companies you can help dictate where they expand their reach and how well they do. You do this by playing cards from your deck which dictate which actions you can take each round, and there’s a really cool dichotomy that it throws up.

There are three different types of resources available, and when you play those cards to your available slots for the round you can use them to buy cards from the market. Those cards get more and more powerful as the game goes on, so it makes sense that you’d want to be the first in the queue at the card shop, because the cheapest stuff goes quickly. That’s a good way to play, and you’ll get to cherry-pick the best cards, but then your resource cards are spent.

In addition to the card actions, there are places on the game board where you can place workers. That’s right, we’ve got some good ol’ worker-placement going on. Some of those places on the board where you can plonk your workers reward you for being the person with the most of a particular colour of resource on your board, unspent. So you might have gotten to the card market after all the bargains had been snagged by those camping out overnight on the pavement, but now there are things available to you that nobody else can claim. The ebb and flow of playing or waiting on cards underpins so much of the game and adds a nice balance. You’re not totally screwed just because you’re the last in turn order, and waiting is often the better option.

All of the card play is really just a means to an end when all is said and done. What really matters is which corporation controls the areas on the main board, and how many shares each player owns in those corporations. It’s a power struggle which both informs and is informed by, the actions of the players.

Land grab

If your experience of share-dealing games revolves around trains (e.g. 18xx, Cube Rails), the concept of being part-owner in multiple companies is nothing new. In many of those games, most of the companies are born equal. That is to say, there’s not necessarily any intrinsic benefit of buying stock in one company instead of another. Skymines spices things up a bit by throwing interchangeable share tracks into the mix. There are some suggested layouts included in the rulebook, but you could have any of the tracks next to any of the companies, and each track grants different bonuses as you march your share marker along it.

The further along each track you inch, the more bonuses you unlock. Bonuses include reducing the cost of certain things, granting permanent additions for actions that spend resources, or even adding new worker spaces to visit for actions that might not have existed before. I really like the way the shares work in this game, and I love the fact that they’re not a neutral part of the gameplay. If there’s a track with a power that you particularly want to use, your choice to invest in the company it’s attached to will directly alter the way the game pans out, and how control of the map swings.

Map control is dictated by spending resources to add outposts from your chosen company’s pool out onto the board. They chain outward, always going adjacent to one another, and the number of lines between where you are and where you want to tell you how many points of energy it’ll cost you. Spaces on the map grant bonuses when they’re claimed, and you get some great opportunities to make short-term plans. Get the bonus for doing this thing here, use that bonus over in this other place. Things like that.

The other thing I really want to highlight is the clever card retrieval mechanism. Above your player board are slots where stacks of used cards end up. When you end a round you take one of those stacks into your hand, and all of the cards you’ve just played have to be split among the remaining stacks. It adds a really cool planning aspect to the game. For example, you might choose to deposit all of your energy cards into one pile over the course of a few rounds, then once you pick that stack up you’re ready for a round of covering the board in little yellow buildings (energy is used to expand each company’s outposts and area control). It lets you choose your strategy and gives equal credibility to playing for a little bit of everything or going full min-max.

Final thoughts

Skymines is a blast. I’ve taught it to my regular group and they all had a great time with it. It’s a strange game in as much as there’s quite a lot going on, but it never feels like it’s too much. Contending with the cards you’ve got in hand and building the stacks from your discarded cards would be enough to think about on its own, but it all just works. The crawl of each company’s outposts as they spread out like mould across the moon (it’s made of cheese, right?) gives you this instantly discernible overview of the state of play. This is helped no end by the genius of not making everything in space, black. Even on the side of the board where you hop from asteroid to asteroid using a new shuttles mechanism, space is white. It creates a much nicer table presence, showing off the non-primary colours nicely.

It’s a heavier game than I’d recommend for newbies to modern games, and I think the decision space would probably just leave them with a sour taste in their mouths. A good way to get the hang of the way things work is to take on the AI opponent, named Luna. It’s an easy-to-run automa opponent which you can add into 2- and 3-player games to add some more competition, which is definitely a good idea. You can play Skymines with two players, but it’s at its best with four. I’ve played two-player games where one of the companies didn’t place outposts, and nobody bought shares in it, and it just made competing for space on the moon less competitive, and less fun. The Luna rulebook that’s included is quite creepy too! It’s written as if the AI opponent is talking to you in the first person, explaining how it all works.

There are parts of the game I haven’t even touched on, such as the helium and research tracks, both of which also lean heavily on your decision-making. They, like so much else in the game, are just individual strands which, once weaved together, create a brilliant, coherent tapestry of a game. Gah, Skymines is just so much fun. I’m trying to write the end of this review, and I keep daydreaming back to recent games of it, and thinking how much I want to play it again, right now. Skymines slipped past a lot of peoples’ radar when it was released towards the end of last year, which is a travesty. Alexander Pfister creates some incredible games (such as my first-ever review here, Maracaibo), and along with fellow designer Viktor Kobilke, they’ve created one of the best games I’ve played. If you like something that’s really going to massage your brain, and you have a regular group of three or four people, do yourself a favour and get Skymines.

You can buy this game from my retail partner, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a 5% discount on your first order of £60 or more.

Skymines (2022)

Design: Alexander Pfister, Viktor Kobilke
Publisher: Pegasus Spiele
Art: Javier Inkgolem
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-150 mins

The post Skymines Review appeared first on Punchboard.

So, how do you create a game about shares and investment, but keep it simple? The best way to do it is to keep the actions simple. If you make the gameplay simple, it leaves your brain free to churn away at a strategy, and that’s precisely what designer (and artist, the clever chap) Mark Gerrits has done with Mini Express. It’s essentially a cube rail game, similar to others I’ve covered here, like Luzon Rails and Ride the Rails.

First class

Your turn in Mini Express is limited to doing one of two things. The main thing you’ll be doing is adding tracks to the map, by taking some (incredibly cute!) wooden trains from the relevant company’s supply, and plopping them onto the hexes between two cities, extending their railway track. Once you’ve done that, you move that company’s track length marker along its track. Longer tracks are worth more points at the end of the game.

The other action is taking a share. It’s another simple action: you take a share certificate from the company’s supply, decrease your level of influence in that company by the number of trains in their supply, then add three more trains to that supply.

That’s it, that’s all you can do in Mini Express. Doesn’t sound too daunting now, does it? It also doesn’t sound that exciting, or interesting, when I break the game down like that. The truth, however, is that this game is very good, and very tense. All of the excitement in the game is generated by the four different colours used, and the interactions between tracks and companies.

Brain training

In Mini Express there are four goods types – cotton, timber, metal and leather (or maybe skins, they’re never actually named in the rules). They correlate to white, brown, grey and orange colours, which just so happen to be the same colours as the companies you’re investing in, and the tracks laid on the map. There’s a weird dichotomy whereby it feels like it should be really easy to understand how they all relate to one another, but in truth it feels oddly confusing in your first game or two.

The longer the track in a particular colour, the more points each share is potentially worth at the end of the game. Each time you connect a track to a new city, you take the token from the city, which in turn increases your level of influence with the companies whose colours are on the token. Are you still with me?

The person who ends up with the most influence in each company gets a number of victory points shown on the track length chart, multiplied by the number of shares you have in that company. If what you’re taking away from this garbled explanation, is that you want to have shares and influence in the companies with the longest tracks, you’re correct. It just feels much more difficult to explain that with the game set up in front of you, which is a weird feeling.

Buffet car

Once you get your head around what you’re trying to do in Mini Express, the game comes alive. Much like choosing a sandwich on the buffet car on a train, there’s a lot to sink your teeth into, but bad decisions can leave you feeling sick. You start out with concrete plans for the game ahead, which some git will shatter like a pneumatic drill, by claiming a connecting city you really wanted. You’ll find your loyalty to lines and colours changing as the game goes on, and it’s the player who most carefully treads these shifting sands who will do well.

Despite only having two actions to choose from, you’ll find yourself agonising over decisions nearly every turn. There’s this brilliant mechanism which means to take a share in a company, you have to give-up influence in that company, to the tune of the number of trains left in their supply. It means you don’t want to take shares if there are too many trains left, but in the same breath, if you lay track using all of the remaining trains in a colour, the next person is left to pickup a free share.

Mini Express has a ton of interactivity, but no real ‘take that!’ mechanism, which I really like. Some games suit direct attacks between players, but not train games. Making a malicious move just to deny someone is a possibility, but it’s highly unlikely, as it benefits nobody. I love that the end-of-game trigger is very visible, which leads to some very exciting last few turns, waiting to see who’s going to end the pursuit of railway riches.

Final thoughts

The more cube rail games I play, the more appreciation I have for the design nuances the designers use. Just like in Ride The Rails, Mini Express has simple, quick turns, and revolves around putting trains on hexes to make tracks. The two games feel very different, in spite of their genetic similarities. Mini Express has a lot more going on, and is a more difficult game to get to grips with. It’s a brilliant game.

The components are outstanding, but I do have a minor complaint about the screen-printed trains. The grey trains have white printing, while the white have grey printing. It can make them confusing when you’re trying to look at routes on the board. There’s a really simple solution though, just lay them face-down.

The solo mode plays a decent game, but it’s no substitute for three to five players. With more than two playing, there’s a terrific feeling of competition. There are some great variants for both the USA and Europe maps (the map board is double-sided!) which throw in some more things to think about, should you get tired of the standard game. Mini express is great. The way it combines simple actions with difficult decisions is utterly compulsive. If you like cube rail games, or are looking for an entry point to the sub-genre, look no further.

Review copy kindly provided by Moaideas Game Design. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

The new expansion map packs and deluxe upgrades for Mini Express go live on Kickstarter in early July. Sign up here to be notified when it launches.

Mini Express (2021)

Designer: Mark Gerrits
Publisher: Moaiseas Game Design
Art: Pinting Pan, Shogun, Desnet Amane, Chiyami
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Mini Express Review appeared first on Punchboard.