Magnum Sal

EvEvanstar2,5

The goal of the game is to make the most money, mostly by filling recipe tiles, with cubes that you dig out of the mineshaft. You can move workers around in the mine to collect cubes. The tricky part is, you can only move workers in such a way that there is still a continuous chain of meeples belonging to all players, and when you extract the cubes but you have to pay money to other players who are in spots that you aren't as you trace your path from the workers to the mine exit space. It's a really fun logistics puzzle, although can get a little mathy. There is also a board of special actions you can take without a meeple. Most of these areas have a special space that someone can assign a meeple to, granting them a dollar each time someone uses that space. The game provides a lot of player interaction, and opportunities to sneak cubes out from spaces other players worked to dig out. Overall the game moves a little slowly compared to other route building games like the Steam series, particularly as at the end of each of the three ages, all meeples come back to you, so imagine building a rail line in a steam game, only every so often all your track comes off the board. It's also a little fiddily handing $1 to player's assistants when you use an action, and then mathing out who gets what while pathing your cubes out of the mine. It feels superficial in the face of the massive rewards gotten from the contract tiles. One imagines the balance of this could have been ironed out a little more interestingly, without all the handing back and forth, muddying the math of who benefits the most from you harvesting cubes. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ☆ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ☆ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment