Board Games
‘Mint Works’ Is an Oligarchy Simulator
Leveraging the Art of Financial Cock-Blocking
Players are rich locals who shape their neighborhoods to match their respective visions. The tin says it’s a worker placement game, but that’s a bit simplistic. The mints represent everything. Your workers are mints. Your money is mints. Your intangible resources and assets are represented by mints. You invest mints to make more mints. And some of the things you buy with mints give you more mints all on their own.
The game’s twist comes from paring limited resources with limited opportunities. There are only 1 or 2 spaces on most Location cards. That means they can only be used once or twice each round. So just because you have the cash doesn’t mean everything’s for sale. Once a location is filled in, you have to look elsewhere. There’s only so many means of production for the bourgeois to exploit.
In the solitaire game, each AI card has its own priorities. Rachael somehow doesn’t contribute to the economy because she saves too much, Mort doesn’t buy factories because he off-shores his production, Sonic moves twice as fast and gets twice as much done but can’t plan ahead, and Justin just goes down the line of location cards and blocks both of you from using that location for the rest of the turn. I’m not sure what that last one is supposed to represent.
The game is tiny. It’s easy to learn and plays in about 10 to 20 minutes. There are no expansions to buy or promo cards to chase down. It’s cheap and fast, making it a good gateway game and a good pickup game. Victory is often sudden. During the Upkeep phase, players tend to say, “Oh, I have 7 stars. I win.”
And then there are the mints. They’re not real mints, of course. They’re wooden tokens, but look edible from a distance. This is obviously a reference to how workers are devoured by rich people. The industrious get to place workers however they wish, so long as their peers haven’t blocked off that opportunity.
And that’s about it. Mint Works is perfect for the land owner with a little time to kill between working the masses to death and paving the way to a brutally mercenary and transactional state.
