I recently visited my homeland of Poland and snagged Magnum Sal on the day it came out. The theme speaks to me considering how I was born only a few kilometres away from the salt mine this game is based on.
Magnum Sal is basically a mining optimisation game which does have some interactivity and plenty of room to wheel and deal (my fave part).
First off and most importantly, my Polish reading skills SUCK, so I was glad to find that the rules book (and it is basically a full book at 50 or so pages) is written in multiple languages (hence the reason for the 50 pages). It is also the nicest rule book I have ever seen, nice thick glossy paper stock and fantastic English translation, (if you have ever been to Poland you may notice that they like to cut corners when it comes to translating into English, one prominent university affiliated English school had a giant billboard ad asking students to "Come learn the English with us".)
The game comes with a BIG bag of wooden cubes and about 30 fairly chunky meeples, none of this fluffy Frenchy Carcassonne meeple nonsense, this is Poland, they like their meeples like their booze, with size and heft.
There are no cards, although there are thick rectangular cardboard tiles that act as cards which represent tools.
The main game board is illustrated similarly to Pillars of the Earth and is setup by locating a long mine shaft at one end of it and then placing random square tiles as horizontal branches of this shaft, these tiles are flipped when a miner-meeple is placed on them and represent unearthed sections of the mine.
Gameplay involves positioning your miner-meeples around in the mine and the town above. To gather resources you need to have a certain amount of meeples in an excavated section of mine to bale water and then have extras around to harvest the salt there. You also need to have miners around to move your salt to the surface if you are missing miners in a chain to the surface you have to pay a fee to the players occupying those areas in order to move your salt topside.
There are also various bonus options topside that you can have your miners perform, such as getting favours from the king, or buying tools or selling salt.
This miner-meeple chain seems like a new concept and I like it, but this game also introduces a whole new concept, fatigue.
Any miners that bale water and harvest resources are fatigued and cannot be used again until you effectively pass your turn to rest them, this makes the game significantly more interesting and sets up all sorts of new dynamics. I’ve only played one game so far and so I can’t comment too much on this dynamic except that you really need to plan a few steps ahead to avoid having to rest only a few of your miners all of the time.
Another feature of the gameplay I really like is that interaction and negotiation is actively encouraged. 228
You can’t harvest resources or excavate new mine sections without having other players around and the player that won our game was the most active negotiator and probably paid out the most cash to the other players simply by positioning his miners to perform the most effective tasks and paying others to truck his stuff topside when necessary. Second place went to the person whom excavated the least amount of salt but simply positioned his miners in such a way that everyone else relied on him to excavate.
After one play, Magnum Sal strikes me as a fresher and more interactive Caylus with a tiny bit more randomness in the tools selection and mine section tiles. Please note that this is not a zero-sum sort of game, you may need to spend cash to make cash here and sometimes you may need to give up on a big score in the short term to have miners ready to hit a bigger score later. I also like how an aggressive strategy is not the best way to win in this very competitive game, it’s refreshing to see that.
On a side note, the town of Wieliczka in southern Poland houses the Wieliczka salt mine this game is based on. If you're ever out in East Europe MAKE SURE to check it out, it is simply stunning, there's a frickin cathedral carved out of salt deep within the mine there. Also check out my hometown of Cracow, you won't be disappointed. 228