Matthew BaileyThe last 2 games we played have one thing in common and that is they were way better than I was expecting them to be and both have rocketed up the “Bailey Boardgame Tier Lists of Playdom.”
The first of these and Game 13 of the Bailey School Holiday Boardgame Marathon (Christmas Edition).” is “Minecraft: Builders & Biomes” (a game I had little expectations of but turns out is excellent) played by Jack(6), Toby(3) and myself.
My usual disclaimer: My boys have both been brought up playing games and as such can play games usually beyond their years. “Minecraft: Builders & Biomes” is stated as 10+ and is definitely not a young kids game.
ignore all the mess in the background we are still sorting out the games room after xmas.
Based on the super-popular video game (that both my older boys love) “Minecraft: Builders & Biomes” can best be described as “a bit like Kingdomino with a 3d spatial block puzzle thrown in… and some monster fighting and weapon collecting.”
You start the game with a 4×4 grid of cards with weapons around the edge. You move in the spaces between the cards and stop on the corner of 4 cards. On your turn, you can do 2 of 5 things.
1) More 0, 1 or 2 spaces and turn over all building cards (some will be buildings some will be mobs (monsters to fight))
2) Take a single weapon card and put it in your weapon deck
3) Take 2 wooden blocks off the wooden block tower. You can only take ones visible on 3 sides and these are then used to…
4) build a building you are next to
5) Fight a monster.
The point of the game is to gain experience points that you get by beating monsters and by building buildings that fulfil requirements.
So you take the very cool wooden blocks that act as building materials and then on your turn if you have enough blocks can take a card and place it on your personal 3×3 grid.
Each card has a Biome (grass, desert etc) a building material (wood, stone etc) and a building type (farm, house etc).
as you clear the wooden blocks on the block tower to build these you score at the end of every round which happens when you completely clear a layer of blocks and this is where it’s super cool.
At the end of round 1, you get points for your biggest connected biome (amount multiplied by rarity (ice is worth more than forest for instance). In round 2 you get points for the biggest connected building material and round 3 the biggest connected building type. In this way, you are trying to match different types of tiles as you go and trying to think multiple turns ahead. It’s a super cool mechanic and one I’d love to see incorporated into a future Kingdomino game (Still need to play origins).
As you kill monsters (by turning over your top 3 weapon cards and seeing if your hearts beat theirs) you also gain experience points, and some can then be used to give you extra action or give you extra points on the end for amounts of certain biomes/material/buildings. Weapons from the edge can also be put into your weapon deck to make them strong as well as give a few other powers.
All in all Jack(6) and I absolutely adored this to pieces and I can see this being a firm family favourite. Toby(3) tried but found it a little tricky to get his head around as there is a lot to think about going on at once. The game itself isn’t too complicated but the sum of its individual parts might be a bit too much for a young child (the game itself says 10+ but that’s never stopped Toby giving things a good bash).
My only complaint is component quality could be marginally better. The cardboard use is unusually flimsy and rather than the characters being cardboard in stands it would have been nice to have some Minecraft miniatures. Clearly, a decent portion of the budget went on the 64 chunky wooden cubes as this is a really nice high-quality part of the game.
if you are a fan of the videogame this is a must buy and to be honest even if you aren’t this is one of the best games I have played as an adult in a long time and it is way better than it has any right to be as a licensed game.
