Matthew BaileyAs I sit trying to think up a potato-based pun for this year’s “Valentine’s half-term week mini marathon (that’s going to largely feature games from “Big Potato Games”) we’re today going to look at “Mandala Stones,” an abstract strategy game from designer Philip Glowacz played by myself and Jack(.8.)
“Mandala Stones” is actually a relatively simple game to understand but is fiendishly difficult to excel at. You start the game by laying out a grid of stones in piles of four, made up of four different colours and two different designs. Then, between the spaces, four artist markers are placed. These are the larger black markers that you can see in the pictures. The two different designs are split over these four markers.
There are two things you can do on your turn. Firstly, you can move any of the markers on the grid into a space between four piles of tokens, and you are then able to take any tokens that surround the artist with a matching pattern and are not next to another artist. Once you have taken your stones, you then have to place them in one of the five spaces on your personal board in any order you wish.
The order in which you place these piles is key because this factors into the second thing you can do on your turn, which is score what is on your board. In order to do this, you can score any of the top tiles on each pile that are the same colour, with each pile having slightly different scoring criteria dependent on the amount of stones in the pile or the colours. You can also simply remove any number of top stones for one point each. These stones then go on the mandala track, which as it grows, gains you extra points and eventually denotes when the game finishes.
“Mandala Stones” is easy to understand but devilishly difficult to excel at and requires deep thinking of position for the order in which you do various actions. Equally, manipulating the main board so that you can take the tokens that you want is challenging.
The component quality is extremely high; the main two boards are good cardstock, which is slightly baffling that the individual board is thinner, but this is a minor gripe. The stones themselves are made of that telltale phenyl-based plastic that has a ceramic quality that you get in games like Hive, and the artist pieces are wooden and have a very pleasant weight to them. The general theme and artwork are beautiful, and the game has great table presence.
Jack and I really enjoyed “Mandala Stones” and played two more games after we finished the first, almost caring more about improving our own score rather than necessarily trying to beat each other (spoiler: he beat me twice).
The game can be picked up these days fairly cheaply, and I would say it is an excellent addition to any collection that I would highly recommend.
