Mined Out Review

Heigh ho! Heigh ho! It’s off to work I go! With a new review of a new Kickstarter game from a little UK publisher: Mined Out! Picture me, if you will, in my miner’s hat, carefully chipping away at the bedrock. We’re sure there is a rich vein of puns around here somewhere and I’ll be damned if we don’t get to the end of this article without having brought some of them to the surface. So is Mined Out a surprise gem? Or am I all… mined out? Let’s find out.

 

 

Players: 1-4

Time: 30 mins

Ages: 12+

 

Note: all pictures are of a prototype copy of the game and not necessarily representative of the final game.

If you dig dig dig with a shovel or pick

In Mined Out, each player heads off to work in their very own mine, pick in one hand, lunch time pasty in the other, searching for those all important points – I mean gems! But gems get you points, of course. You also get points for growing your mine, researching new technologies and, er, not blowing each other up. Everything helps! So who will be running the slickest mine is the order of the day. Ok, got your pickaxe ready? Let’s go deeper!

Each turn you’ll get 3 action points to spend on doing stuff, though you can overspend at the cost of your following turn and underspend for a bigger turn next round, offering you some welcome flexibility. What can you spend action points on Matt? Well, I’m glad you asked! You can move! And as you’ll know from all that time you’ve spent moving, it’s much easier to move sideways than to move down. Each layer of the mine you penetrate into is a serious decision made all the more perilously terrifying by the fact that you have no way back up! Here, put this hard hat on; let’s get some light on this.

Yes, for whatever reason your enthusiasm for getting down the mines rather outweighed your planning because you didn’t bring any kind of ladder with you. So from the start you cannot take a step upward! But don’t worry, you won’t be trapped down here forever, you can always invent one. Each player has 4 technology cards that, once flipped, improve your little miner’s ability to mine (and score you points). So the ladder let’s you move up in the hope of seeing sunlight and hearing birdsong once again, the mighty shovel let’s you move down for one action point instead of two. You can buy the world’s most expensive cup of coffee (2 yellow and 1 red gem, to take away please) for an extra action point each round, and a mine cart that increases your capacity to haul gems, whose only disappointing feature is the fact that I’ve never managed to make full use out of it. It tends to be one of the last upgrades you buy and collecting that many gems is quite a challenge. Especially when some other sod buys their last piece of technology and ends the game. Now, watch your head, the ceiling’s getting a bit low.

We dig up diamonds by the score

You begin the game as all mines do, on a single tile with all the potential of Earth’s resources beneath your feet. As you move off the edges you draw new tiles from the appropriate stacks revealing a new section of mine with some number of gem piles glittering upon them. As you move down you get into the yellow stack, then the red and I expected to see steadily increasing rewards since, naturally, red gems are far more valuable than greens. But that isn’t the case. You can find little more than a lonely green gem on a red tile and a horde of yellows and reds on a green tile. And these are dealt out randomly at the start of the game. At this point my metaphorical reviewer’s canary fell off its perch: I’d found a deadly pocket of gas and would need to shut this mine down. But I was completely wrong.

You see, even though there is luck in the draw, how you make use of that is not as obvious as it sounds! When you move over a gem pile you pick up a gem of the corresponding colour, but doing so destabilises the tile (awkwardly represented by twisting the tile 45 degrees). Mining a second time on that tile will cause it to collapse, flinging you into the closest neighbouring tile and permanently blocking off that section of your mine. So even with access to a great tile, you can still only get a single gem off it safely. Unless, that is, you spend effort building a support. These wooden posts stop adjacent tiles from becoming unstable and anyone can build them at any point… so long as you’re willing to spend 2 of your yellow gems! A hefty cost! So finding an early great tile isn’t of huge benefit as to get the most out of it you’ll have to travel back to build a support. Or intentionally collapse it, that’s a strategy too! Every time I thought that Mined Out wasn’t going to work I was proven wrong, the games never having a clear winner until the total was counted. This is a deceptively simple game, because it has depths to explore, layers to think about… strata you might say! Maybe I’ll stop digging now…

But even with sticks of dynamite going off, I wasn’t blown away. You very much end up playing your own game, and while you do care that someone else isn’t going to end the game suddenly, for 95% of the game you’ll just be doing your own thing. That other 5% is the dynamite, allowing you to reach over and immediately collapse one tile from another player’s mine. This is, naturally, quite amusing, and is there to let you prevent any super good pair of tiles that flop randomly out of the draw stacks. You only have one piece though, so the decision of when to use it is an important one. It’s a bit of a quick fix to a potential balance issue and it feels odd to only have one direct interaction move in the whole game. Especially when it is quite a powerful piece of take-that in an otherwise low interaction experience.

But we don’t know what we dig ‘em for

The other thing about Mined Out that I feel stopped it from being great, rather than good (it is good!) is that I don’t feel like I have a reason for why I’m doing what I’m doing. Obviously collecting gems would be a reason unto itself if that was the main aim of the game and I don’t feel like it is. Certainly you do spend a lot of time collecting gems, but because the end game criteria is developing technology, you end up converting most of those gems into… shovels… and ladders. So the gems feel like more of a means to an end than the driving force of the game.

Look at something like New York 1901, the aim is clearly to build skyscrapers, lots of ever taller skyscrapers and that feels good and satisfying and every other way of attaining points fits into that. Even a point salad game like Castles of Burgundy has you obviously building a great big estate. Perhaps it’s slightly unfair to compare Mined Out to one of those greats, but they illustrate what I felt was missing. You explore this mine, you collect some gems, and you research some technology. All of those three things are worth doing, and none of those things rise above any other to say, yes, that is what I’m trying to achieve.

That was a rather nebulous criticism but hopefully gave some idea of what I felt was missing. Mined Out is a good, solid game. It feels well balanced (even surprisingly so given the random setup) and there are plenty of things to think about. I don’t feel like the low interaction is too much of an issue (though it might be for you) and I would be happy to play it again. But it was missing that spark to turn it from a good game into a great game.

Rating: Heigh ho!

 

Our copy of Mined Out was provided for review by the publisher, Braincrack Games. Mined Out will be on Kickstarter until December 8th!