The previous game in this 'Thaumata' series, Sabika, was my game of the year in 2022 and my first 10 out of 10 review. How does the follow up Men-Nefer fare? Lets find out..
Men-Nefer
Designer: Germán P Millán
Publisher: Ludonova
2024
How to Play:
Following on the heels of 2022’s ‘Sabika’, publisher Ludonova & designer Germán P Millán’s newest title, Men-Nefer, sees players “reliving one of the greatest periods of ancient Egypt, carrying out tasks typical to Egyptian culture.”
The game takes place over three ‘eras’ - with nine turns each per era. While the main board looks sprawling and as epic as its historical setting, you’ll trigger all of your actual turns in just the big central grey box slap bang in the middle of the board. Nice and straightforward. Starting the game with three workers (and three randomly assigned action tiles sitting alongside those workers) – you’ll spend your turns each era either:
• Placing a worker onto a space on the main board – paying increasing ‘food’ costs if there are already one or more workers in the space you want to visit. The worker takes its adjacent action tile with it, takes the action(s) displayed it and then discards the tile.
• Now you’ve a free space on your player board for an action tile having already used one or more up this round, you can choose a new action tile from a shared display. Crucially though, this isn’t to be used again this era. Instead you’re gazing in to your crystal ball to ponder which actions you might want to be taking next era. Hopefully you are first to claim (and can afford!) the action tile that you want?
• That worker you placed out earlier? You can slide it to the right whenever you are ready. Sliding it over serves to ‘power up’ that particular space and its associated actions. For your troubles, you might as well take that powered up action now!
Place a worker and use one of your action tiles, claim a new action tile for a future round, slide your worker to the right to make that space more powerful. The End.
Well, I say ‘the end’ but as straightforward and simple as that turn structure is…KABOOM the board quickly starts to explode! The actions that you are triggering when you use up one of your action tiles or slide your workers results in a veritable feast of things happening across the main board’s representation of ancient Egypt:
• Sail boats up the Nile – stopping off in ports to claim some potential contracts to fulfil.
• Unlock and place out mummies in the Necropolis – some immediate bonuses on offer but also a race to reach the spaces that award ongoing VP at the end of each round.
• Move along some tracks, building the Great Pyramids as you go. One pyramid scores you jumbo points at the end of each era, another scoring points as a reward for things you may have been wise to complete elsewhere in the game.
• Unlock and place out the Sphinx – a plethora of increasing immediate bonuses on offer.
• Collect offerings and then move through the palace, stopping off to worship as gaining the benefits of your offerings.
• Climb up the Obelisk- I’d like to paint this as a unique and never before seen innovation. However ‘climb a track, get some points and bonuses’ sums it up.
• Collect hieroglyphics as a nice small bit of set collection.
• Sweat profusely throughout at an almost incessant need to have fish to pay for everything, but never quite having as much as you want.
Points everywhere for doing all of the above and the person at the end of three eras who has the most points wins. Watching a playthrough video would do things more justice here – Men-Nefer is greater than the sum of its parts and things meld and cling together excellently. There are also a good few wrinkles that I haven’t touched on in my brief summary above.
Solo Headlines:
An entire side of the main board is dedicated to the solo mode.
Not 1-2 players on one side and 3-4 players on the other as with some other games. An entire side for the solo player. Not a different version of the game for solo players and the ‘real’ game on the other side for multiplayer. Nope, a well-thought-out and considered entire side for the solo player with some subtle and helpful references and extremely mild tweaks. This spoke volumes to me on my first playthrough – I didn’t just feel ‘accommodated’, I felt that the designer and publisher had genuinely recognized me as a solo player and had taken the solo mode as seriously as any other part of the game. It’s not tacked on, it’s not an afterthought – the solo player was so well regarded that they get a full side of the board all to themselves.
No wafer-thin deck of cards either for Imhotep, your point-scoring solo opponent. Instead, he has 9 thick luxurious tiles which he uses during the game. My oh my, I’m starting to feel spoiled.
Imhotep has his own separate rulebook which usually strikes fear into me – worries that this might indicate a complex set of rules for the solo mode in addition to the chunky main ruleset. But nope, it turns out broadly speaking that Imhotep plays his turns exactly as the human player would – with a few mild exceptions and placement rules here and there to familiarize yourself with in his very short and succinct solo rulebook. Flip one of his nine tiles, do the action on the tile largely as you would take your own turn. Bliss.
Imhotep is doing something that I particularly like here – but I think it’s worth mentioning as I think that it could potentially be a turn-off for some solo players: He is somewhat predictable. I really like a tiny bit of predictability in a solo mode – I see it as an extra puzzle to have to consider. It means that I am not just planning and pondering my own turns whilst juggling a game mechanism or three – I’m also trying to second guess and thwart my artificial opponent. Here in Men-Nefer, when Imhotep draws a tile and can’t take the action, the unused tile goes to the bottom of his deck to be drawn again later in the round. This happens enough for me to start getting a sense of what is or isn’t left to be drawn next. Perhaps therefore I might want to rush to get something before he pilfers it – or indeed perhaps I might want to hold back, safe in the knowledge that he’s not going to be challenging quite yet for the thing I have my eyes on. Equally, when he places out his workers, he is following some simple placement logic. Nothing too complex: things like ‘place where the human player has a worker’ or ‘place where he is the most powerful’. This lets me again second guess where he might go, where I might want to reach first, where I might want to pause on racing towards. Trying to find ways of getting the better of him by being able to second guess what he is going to be doing next is an excellent puzzle within a puzzle for me – but I concede that it’s not going to be for everyone.
I found Imhotep to be a good challenge and it took a fair few games before I got that tasty first win under my belt. No ‘easy mode’ on offer here however which might be a bit disheartening for the first few games – though I did try this simple tweak from the BGG forums which worked a treat. Some simple enough adjustments are in the rulebook however to make the solo difficulty a little harder – though I might have wanted something more than ‘start Imhotep with a few more points than you’ type tweaks.
Plays in my 60 – 75 minute sweet spot (not including a hefty set up) and a very enjoyable 60 – 75 minutes it is.
General Headlines:
The second game in the ‘Thaumata’ series from publisher Ludonova, Men-Nefer was always going to be a tough act to follow as the first game in the series, Sabika, was a huge hit for me – an underappreciated gem full of deep strategic gameplay. Fortunately, Men-Nefer more than holds its own and ends up being an extremely accomplished and classy affair.
Production quality here in Egypt is superb. Thick boards, excellent and quirky screen-printed wooden pieces, chunky and tactile wooden pyramids to build which look fabulous. Might I have craved dual-layer player boards? Perhaps, but it’s the only grumble in an otherwise excellent production.
While I think the game looks great sprawled out on the table, I can also see how it might initially be a little polarizing. At a quick, cursory glance things might appear to be quite dry, mechanical and just a mishmash of boxes and squares. However, I must give the game credit here for how thematic things end up feeling out on the main board: sailing up the Nile, building pyramids, placing mummies into the necropolis, climbing the obelisk, worshipping in the temple. Men-Nefer doesn’t feel like a mishmash of abstract mini-games with an Egyptian theme pasted on. It feels like a high level of thought has been given to capturing (albeit in an abstracted way) the main sights and smells of its historical setting.
Gameplay wise, all of those areas out on the main board are never going to win any awards for innovation – you’ve got some more than familiar stuff going on, but it all melds together in a really interesting and satisfying way. I particularly liked how whatever you choose to do out on the main board, it always seems to have an impact on one or more places everywhere else. It’s certainly a game of combos popping but what I find most interesting here is that quite often those combos are not exploding on things that you might have been hoping for but instead they are revealing new tactical opportunities that you may not have considered until that point. You may well have thought that in this playthrough you were going to only focus on building pyramids and planned to completely ignore the sailing action – but lo and behold those combos start revealing sailing opportunities that suddenly become too hard to resist! This is a game that emerges. It’s a game that sees you setting off with half a plan but it’s a game that sees you quickly and frequently having to adjust that plan.
This isn’t a game where you can go significantly heavy in only one or two areas (though I am sure some may want to correct me in the comments below?!). Sure you might be doing a little more of something here and there but I don’t recall a game where I didn’t do a little bit of everything. This was both enjoyable and perhaps a tiny bit disappointing. Enjoyable because I found myself literally having to juggle the entire board – nothing could be disregarded, everything was to play for, every turn was an opportunity to make another part of the board move. Enjoyable because by the end of the game the whole board’s vision of Egypt had come to life in a really satisfying way. Disappointing however as my personal tastes do lend themselves more to ‘the strategic’. I enjoy going hard on a particular area and then switching to a different focus in subsequent playthroughs (something along the lines of Great Western Trail and the ability to do a heavy cattle strategy one game and then a heavy building strategy the next etc). Men-Nefer’s ‘do a little of everything’ was super satisfying but perhaps did mean that overall replayability and variability was impacted. Don’t get me wrong, this is staying firmly in the collection and I will enjoy each and every play – I just might not play five games in a row each time like I might with some other titles.
I’ve very much enjoyed each of the previous titles from designer Germán P. Millán (Sabika, Bamboo, and Bitoku) and while Men-Nefer visually shares more than a lot with its family member Sabika (courtesy of artwork from Laura Bevon) – it’s actually Bitoku where the similarities are the closest. Bitoku at first glance looks completely overwhelming with its huge colourful boards and what appears to be a substantial amount of options to choose from. In practice though its turns are pretty straightforward a) play a card to unlock a die b) place the die on one of a handful of spaces on the main board c) move one of your already placed dice over to an adjacent space. That’s it. Ok, each of those actions then triggers something a lot bigger which you need to wrap your head around, but at its core each turn is dare I say…simple. Men-Nefer follows an almost identical format – only three options each turn, place a worker, move a worker, claim an action tile for a future round. Again, dare I say simple, but again that simple turn structure then sees the main board explode into life.
The game’s USP for me is that each round you don’t necessarily have immediate free reign on which actions to take. Planning ahead is crucial. The action tiles that you snaffle up this round dictate which actions you are going to have available to you next round. Have a grand plan in mind? Let’s hope the right action tiles become available and let’s hope you are first to get them. If Men-Nefer had simply been a ‘freely take any action and may the best player win’ sort of game then I think it might have been lost in the crowd. It’s this future gazing to try and plan your next round while you are currently playing the previous round which elevates this puzzle.
Combos everywhere, smooth gameplay, simple turn structure, excellent solo mode – it’s a very classy game and one of the more technically impressive euros I’ve played recently. I have a couple of minor gripes – more to do with my preferred playing style rather than any real fault of the game. Firstly, the game is played over three ‘eras’ (each comprising nine turns). The game doesn’t significantly ‘swell’ however – this isn’t an engine builder where you start small in era one and then by the end of era three you are drowning in resources and VP. Bonuses and gains do increase but only fractionally. Each era in Men-Nefer feels quite similar – puzzly and brilliantly so, but similar nonetheless and I might have liked the game arc to swell and grow a teeny tiny bit more.
Secondly, it’s almost impossible for me not to compare Men-Nefer to Sabika, and wow did Sabika scratch my strategy itch. There were strategic objectives everywhere with massive big spotlights shining on them right from the start of the game. Major contracts to fulfil, things to try and target by the end of certain rounds. End game scoring was what Sabika was all about – the final reward for all your toil. No end game scoring at all in Men-Nefer however. No upfront strategic objectives to gaze upon to steer your gameplay. You play your three eras, accrue your points as you go and the game then abruptly ends. That isn’t to say it’s utterly devoid of strategic aims and goals – but they are subtle and you have to hunt and uncover them. Men-Nefer is a significantly more tactical game than Sabika’s ultra-strategic focus which is going to appeal massively to some players more than others. Do not get me wrong, I very much enjoy Men-Nefer but I wonder how much more I might have enjoyed this if the game handed me some strategic contracts to fulfil at the start and I could spend all game trying to smash them. I suspect in that instance Men-Nefer may have immediately become a Top 10 game for me. As it stands, it becomes a rock-solid, classy Euro that errs more on the tactical side than I might have personally craved.
Truth be told however, between Men-Nefer and Sabika you have two extremely good, contrasting games and I massively look forward to seeing what is coming next both from Germán P. Millán and this Thaumata series of games.
At a Glance:
Men-Nefer, the second game in Ludonova's 'Thaumata' series, has excellent, deep gameplay and high production quality. A visually appealing and thematic experience, the game requires players to juggle multiple distinct mechanisms and has heaps of satisfying combos. While it may lack the heavily signposted strategic objectives found in Sabika, this will certainly appeal to fans of emergent, tactical gameplay. Men-Nefer is a technically excellent Euro with a splendid solo mode - another very classy game from German P Millan.
(As a very short postscript, take a look at the game Amritsar – also published by Ludonova which came out between the releases of Sabika and Men-Nefer. It’s not designed by Germán P Millán (though he helped develop the solo mode I believe) and it’s not part of this Thaumata series, but it certainly feels like it could and should have been and sees you building the eponymous Golden Temple. Check out my review of it here – it’s a game that deserves much more attention).
Final Score:
8.5 out of 10 (nudge this up to a 9 if you prefer tactical gameplay)
Reviewed after 7 plays.
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