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Founded around 3050 BCE and located south of the River Nile Delta, Men-Nefer (a.k.a., Memphis) became the capital of ancient Egypt and the most populated city on the planet.
In Men-Nefer, you will relive one of the greatest periods of ancient Egypt, carrying out tasks typical to Egyptian culture: acquiring knowledge in the houses of life, navigating and trading on the Nile River, making offerings to the revered God, embalming the corpses of the nobles to send them off to a better life, erecting beautiful sphinxes, and contributing to the construction of the Great Pyramids. In addition to this, you must be careful of how you make your way through this earthly world to be sure that Osiris will grant you passage to Aaru, the long-awaited heavenly paradise of the afterlife.
Throughout three eras, by means of a novel selection of actions that combine worker placement and tile drafting, players choose on each turn which area of Egyptian life and culture they wish to develop. Players must attempt to obtain the greatest number of prestige points in each era since only the one who manages to achieve the most prestige will take the victory.
—description from the publisher
- It is so thematic, filled with so much juicy goodness.
- It has so many colorful pieces in it.
- Several mini games essentially.
- Beautiful chunky pieces on the board that actually give you bonuses or multiplicative scoring.
- Contracts, the tombs and the pyramids are going to score every single round.
- Really cool interesting mechanics.
- Duot track mechanic is really cool.
- Pattern matching with the papyrus is a bonus.
- Offering pyramid is a really cool mechanic.
- Escalating reward level.
- managing ancient Egypt
- ancient times in Egypt
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Duot Track — One of the main ones is the duot track. And this is the ancient Egyptian idea of that your heart needs to weigh less than a feather when you go into the afterlife. So, this is represented by a plus minus track at the top of the board where throughout the game, you're going to be trying to get your heart and your feather to cross each other so that instead of getting negative points, you end up getting positive points.
- pattern matching — Another aspect that I really like is the pattern matching that comes with the papyrus. You don't have to match the images, but it's a bonus if you do. And this is one of the main ways you're going to be able to get your feather along, whereas your heart is going to largely come along through many of the different actions on the game.
- set collection — Another really cool mechanic is the offering pyramid that you're going to build in your own little tableau. This is the offerings that you're going to be able to give at the temple, but you're going to get bonus actions.
- worker placement — One of them is worker placement, which is a planning action essentially. So, you're going to get a tile that you're going to do the action from, but you're going to place the worker in another spot. That's going to represent the action that you can do later when you take that action, as well as you can replace those tiles, which is another type of action. And then that third action, once you've placed that worker on the board, you can slide it over and then do the other actions of where you've placed your particular apprentice.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- This is a big heavy euro and I love it.
- It is so thematic, filled with so much juicy goodness.
- Overall, Men Nefer is one of my favorite picks that I grabbed from Essen last year.
References (from this video)
- engaging core action system
- works well multiplayer and solo
- layered interaction between actions
- heavy on icons; potential learning curve
- ancient Egyptian-themed Euro with rich notation
- Egyptian theme with icons and mini-games
- Euro with thematic flavor
- Beku
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- iconography — lots of icons and mini-games interwoven into the action economy
- nine actions per round — three of one type, three of another type, three of a third type; order matters
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- If you enjoy the Ingenious game, I would definitely have a look at Ingenious 3D.
- Tower Up is the game that I would play with non-gamers.
- This is SETI, and it's cool from a mechanical perspective.
- The narrative is exceptional. The writing style is superb.
- Civolution has micro turns... your turn is generally fairly short and doesn't contain any chaining of actions.