In case you didn’t know, beehaw.org decided to defederate both lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. You can read about it here. Essentially it means beehaw.org users can no longer see my posts/comments, it’s like they shadow banned my entire server. Thanks to @donio@feddit.de for messaging me about it. I have created this account on feddit.de just to post these reviews, hopefully it reaches our fellow boardgamers in all servers.

Today’s game is an underrated gem: Menara

TL;DR

Score: 8.5

Positives

• Very easy to teach

• Cooperative

• Fun for both casual & experienced players

• Sliding difficulty is well ballanced

• Everyone wants to take a picture at the end of the game

Negatives

• Table bumps can prematurely end the end, it’s always sad

• Can be frustrating if one person wants to play “mission impossible” on every turn

The review

Menara is one of my most successful gateway games and I definitely recommend it to everyone who enjoys dexterity games.

At the start of the game you randomly draw 3 odd-shapped tiles, called Temple Floors, to create level 0. The Temple Floors have small colored circles on them. During the course of the game you will be placing pillars on these circles. Red pillar goes on red circle, and so on. The objective of the game is to end the game with 4 levels of temple floors, excluding level 0.

Every player has 4 colored columns (depends on number of players and difficulty) and there is a community camp which hosts 6 columns. At the beginning of your turn you can swap your columns with the community camp as you wish. It’s important to coordinate with your team and try to distribute the colors among everyone else. Then, you draw a card from the easy, medium or hard pile and perform the corresponding action. The most common action is fairly simple: place a column. All you have to do is place one of your columns in a base with the same color. Easy, right? Well, I’ll let you discover the tricky ones by yourself :) If all the circles of your temple floor are occupied you stop your turn and place a new Temple Floor on top of whatever columns you want. Hopefully you added a new level and you’re closer to the goal!

At this point you’re probably thinking this game is super easy. I assure you, it is not. The game does not end after you made it to level 4. Oh, no. During the course of the game you’ll find that you draw a card and the action is impossible to perform. Maybe it asks you to put 2 columns but unfortunately you don’t have circles matching your column’s colors. Then, the target goal increases by one level. Now you need to make it to level 5. The game only ends when you’re either: out of cards, out of columns or out of temple floors. You lose the game if any floor falls.

This game is currently ranked #783 but I think it’s one of the best dexterity games out there. It’s very easy to teach, very intuitive. You draw a card and place a couple of columns. Easy. What sets it appart from the competition is the cooperative aspect of the game. It REALLY makes everyone very engaged with the game. No one wants to see the whole structure fall and everyone is trying their best. Quarterback/alpha gaming is basically not a thing. People can throw you hints on how do balance the floors or something but you’re the one who’s gonna have to do it, no one can play for you. The game get increasingly tense with time as the strugle starts to wiggle, everyone starts like controling their breathing to prevent anything from falling. It feels great to succeed in this game and at the end of the game everyone is gonna take a picture of what you built!

Context Information

I only log games with scores so unfortunately I don’t have any logs for Menara

Suggested player count: 2-3 players is best, 4 players is also great but you wait longer

Win-rate: Well below 50%

Honorable mentions

• I’d really like to try Crokinole, seems like something I’d enjoy. Unfortunately it’s super expensive :(