Our Minecraft Builders and Biomes review, what we have to say about the smash hit video game turned engine building tabletop title. Players explore the Overworld, build structures, and mine resources, earning points for structures and the largest connected biomes of forest, desert, mountain, or snowy tundra spaces on their player boards. This is a great adaption of the video game that could absolutely stand on its own.
We took a look across fun, replayability, player interaction, quality and art & style to come up with the overall score for our Minecraft Builders and Biomes review. See the breakdown by category below.
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– CATEGORY BREAKDOWN –
Fun (8 out of 10)
For the fun section of the Minecraft Builders and Biomes review, we award a good 8 out of 10. The is not a cash grab on a popular brand, this is a well constructed engine building game. There are many others out there like this but it is a really good mix of building up your empire for points, and building up your character to battle when needed. If you like games of this type and really want to be thrown in the Minecraft universe, you are going to have a good time.
You make a grid out of secret tiles. When you move through them, they flip over and can either be a property upgrade for you to buy or it could be an enemy for you to take on. The center of the grid has all the meat, but the outskirts give you some great weapon upgrades. Weapons help you fight, and locale updates how you score. Having this mix of thinking about how you move, thinking about how good of a warrior you are and how good your empire is doing, as each thing intertwines with one another, makes for great gameplay.
Replayability (6 out of 10)
For the replayability section of the Minecraft Builders and Biomes review, we award a good 6 out of 10. There is plenty of freshness in this game, so no need to worry. Everything is a secret, and different from game to game, until it is right there blowing up in your face. This keeps things as interesting as the first time you played it.
All this being said, the game faces an interesting conundrum. It is built to be accesible. Kids, the audience Minecraft, will love this because it is enough for them to wrap their head around. Because of this, some of the stuff will run its coarse. Scoring is always done in the same way and combat gets to be the same once you get a feel for when and how to upgrade. This is not a bad thing, especially since knowing this there are expansions here and coming that add very cool new aspects, just like a video game would.
Player Interaction (6 out of 10)
For the player interaction section of the Minecraft Builders and Biomes review, we award a solid 6 out of 10. You are fighting over resources, both due to limited supply and because getting their first is key, but that is about it. Besides getting something out of the way, your actions are really not going to affect anything else players do.
With a tableau builder like this, you are never going to see player interaction as the marquee aspect since it is mostly about the battle with yourself and how you manage resources but you do have to give them credit for how they bring movement into an engine building game like this. This aspect and the ability to step on each other’s toes is just enough to give to give interactive life to this world.
Quality (7 out of 10)
For the quality section of the Minecraft Builders and Biomes review, we award a very good 7 out of 10. The way they turned the video game into a board game was genius. This world could have easily gone in any direction, but they really chose a fitting genre and they built an experience that was it’s own for it. They brought together a few different mechanical experiences into a great unique experience that is definitely on theme. This is not a fly by night game, the entire team behind this one took their time.
The components and production value are wonderful. The resources are giant wooden cubes just to stay true to the theme, you cannot get richer in component wealth than that. Cardboard tiles that could easily be thinner are not, which is always a refreshing sign of a publisher that cares.
Art & Style (8 out of 10)
For the art & style section of the Minecraft Builders and Biomes review, we award a great 8 out of 10. They get incredibly high marks here because it is not easy to take an existing product and translate it into a board game this well. Everything is blocky, as it should be, but there is tons of art and creatures, all brand new and unique. Do not expect stale Minecraft stuff here, there is tons of stuff that don’t just recycle the universe but bring new light into it. To win, you do not need victory points, you need to gain experience.
We need to take an entire paragraph to talk about the resource cube stack. The juice that is going to fuel your purchases is a giant square structure made of small wooden blocks, each the size of a marble, stacked together. The game comes with a mold so you can form this at the beginning and pull it off to reveal the multicolor glory. When you choose to take a brick, you can only take one with two sides showing. At the start this means just the corners, but as you take, more of the current rows and additional spaces below. It is an incredibly cool solution to a problem and so very Minecraft.
– IN CLOSING –
Minecraft Builders and Biomes Review | Board Game Halv
Minecraft Builders and Biomes successfully does the video game justice. This is not just a rehash, there is plenty of new content that will add to the lives of any fan of the franchise. New fans are welcome to, they may have been able to satisfy the brand fans as a first hurdle, but then they went and made a solid engine building game out of this. A board game version could have gone in many directions but they smartly created a resource management game that balances exploration, combat and biome evolution. This has been our Minecraft Builders and Biomes review, we hope you enjoyed it!
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See the full explanation of the judging criteria here.
