We packed our trucks with mints and drove them around the region in Mint Delivery, the next game in our A-Z game shelf play-through.
Basic Info: Mint Delivery
Players: 1-4
Time: 15-30 Minutes
Designers: Justin Blaske
Artists: Felix Janson, Thomas Tamblyn
Publisher: Five24 Labs
In Mint Delivery, players drive their trucks from warehouse to city and back, fulfilling orders for plain, sugar-free, and cinnamon mints. Once enough orders have been delivered, the game ends, and whoever completed the most valuable combination of deliveries wins.
The game is set up with the grid of map cards laid out in the middle of the table. The orders are shuffled and three dealt to each player. Players choose which orders to keep, but may only keep orders with a total value of six or fewer points. The discarded orders are then shuffled back into the order deck and a stack of seven orders is dealt out to each corner of the map. The mint supply is placed nearby.
Each player chooses a truck, places its token in Mintopia City, and takes the corresponding card and loads up four white mints. They reveal the orders they kept, and play begins.
On their turn, players can take two actions from the following: moving their truck one space on the map, loading or upgrading mints on their truck if at a warehouse, and taking orders if at the one of the cities. As a free action, the player may also fulfill an order if they have the right mints and are in the order’s corresponding city.
The game ends at the end of the round when either two cities have no more orders available or when all four cities have no orders in their decks. Players then count up the points on their completed orders, and player with the most points wins.
I backed this game on Kickstarter because I liked Mint Works, but it took me a while to get it to the table after I received my copy. Unfortunately, I’ve only been able to play either solo or with two players, and it’s not as engaging a game to me as Mint Works. Each game feels fairly the same. We have tried with the advanced rules, where you can gain special abilities over the course of the game or add obstacles to the board, but it just hasn’t tickled our fancy as much as its cousin.
How is it as a 2-player game? Mint Delivery is fine as a 2-player game … there isn’t a lot of player interaction, because you don’t block each other on the road. You can snag an order someone else wants, but you are limited to three active orders at a time, so that might not be good for you. Also, with just two players, we were usually on different sides of the map, playing our own game.
How about the art and component quality? The game is essentially a deck of cards, mint and truck tokens, and a tin. All of the components are fine, though the tin is just big enough for the pieces, so it can be frustrating to pack them just right.
Will this stay in my collection? Probably not. It’s small and doesn’t take up a lot of space, but I haven’t found it terribly interesting and it doesn’t make it to the table.
