Matthew BaileyMinecraft Heroes of the Village is essentially a co-operative strategy game similar to Pandemic, where you are trying to stop the Illagers from reaching your village, which is done by building three buildings out of cubes that you mine.
On your turn you can:
- Lay a new tile, which potentially adds more mining sites as well as more cubes to the bag
- Mine a tile, which involves taking three cubes out of the bag and hoping one will be the colour you are mining—if so, you get to keep it. If you draw Redstone, you get to keep that too. Drawing black means a monster attacks, which in turn means you can…
- Fight a monster by rolling the dice
- Add cubes that have been mined to a building
At the end of your turn, you roll the Illager die and have a 50/50 chance for the Illagers to move
forward one space.
You win by building all three buildings and lose if the Illagers reach the village.
This game is clearly intended for younger children than some of the other Minecraft games, and the kids had fun with it—but I do have a few issues with the game as a whole.
Firstly, the difficulty may be too low. The first game we played was with the three easiest buildings and the Illagers starting further up the track (essentially the easiest possible setup), and we absolutely breezed through it…
The second game we played on maximum difficulty, with the three hardest buildings and the Illagers starting closer—and we still managed to complete it on the first try. Now, I know it’s designed for kids, but I’m not sure mine will want to go back to it, knowing they’ve already beaten it on the hardest setting without house rules.
My other issue is with the Illager mechanics and how they interact with fighting monsters. Monsters each have a number (4–6) that you need to roll to defeat them, and when you fight one, you get three dice rolls to try. There are no consequences for failing aside from lost time.
The dice include the numbers 4, 5, and 6, one Illager symbol (which makes the Illagers advance), and two retreat symbols (which make them move back up the track). This is the only way to make the Illagers move backwards—and it’s only on the combat dice.
Therefore, it’s actually not in your best interest to kill the monsters. Ideally, you want one you can just keep fighting over and over, as statistically the retreats will appear more often than the advances… and this became Toby’s job, which made the game pretty easy.
Each player chooses a character and a pet. These pets give you extra abilities—some of which are extremely powerful.
Component quality is fine for what it is, though minis would have been nice. The big, chunky wooden cubes are as lovely as last time.
We enjoyed it, but I’m not sure we’ll play it again. I might let the dust settle and see if anyone comes up with better house rules, because at the moment it seems too easy, and the monster dice feel very unbalanced and exploitable. But as an introduction to Pandemic-style games for children, it’s a great option.
If you want a Minecraft game for slightly older kids, however, Minecraft Builders and Biomes is the better choice and much younger kids i’d prob go with Builders and Biomes Junior.
