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Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — Garden of Minions, or Three Shall Be the Number Thou Shalt Count

Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — Garden of Minions, or Three Shall Be the Number Thou Shalt Count
Board Game: Garden of Minions
Kuro, who self-publishes games under the label Manifest Destiny, creates games that — despite having few components or rules — are complicated to play, most notably with The Ravens of Thri Sahashri. You know what the goal is, that's clear, but you have no clue what to do to get there. You can't easily judge when an action you perform is good or bad because everything is circumstantial and all will be revealed in time, possibly when it's too late.

Garden of Minions is not nearly as opaque as Ravens, but you have lots of little choices in this solitaire dice game and often a choice is revealed to be wrong only as you see death zooming toward you — and yet maybe the choice was right after all, if only fate had proved kinder with the dice rolls. You're playing the odds constantly, yet you can split the odds over and over again to try to pull things in your favor. Sometimes, that works...

From gallery of W Eric Martin
Close to death, despite the lack of enemies

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