Mountain Miners

Mountain Miners is a very simple game about grabbing tiles and scoring points.

The table contains a “mountain” of tiles. On your turn, you are only allowed to grab a tile from the top of the mountain. Which side is at the top, however, will change all the time ;)

Plan ahead and rotate the moutain wisely to get the highest scoring tiles for yourself—and force your opponents to grab the worst ones.

What’s special?

This is truly one of my simplest games. The rules are less than a page and the material to print only a few pages of tiles. The whole game is played faceup, which means you also don’t need to memorize any special actions or scoring beforehand.

(If the tiles were secret, or in your hand, you wouldn’t be able to just ask other players what something means. This is why I generally prefer games which completely “open information”, because it just makes teaching and playing a first game much easier.)

And all of that is only possible thanks to a weird idea: what if you had a tile-laying game, but instead of the map being a regular square shape, we rotate it to make it a diamond?

I tested it, refined it, and then we suddenly had a game!