Vasel Family Reviews: Minigolf Designer

You're doing a great job Tom As a businessman , a gamer and a Father👍

... "the art looks very similar to what my kids draw and wow i hate it..." lol

I could see this being a game where the app version is way better than the cardboard version.

Misread the title as Minigolf Disaster. That caught my interest.

I never thought a game about minigolf could be so complex. Informative review though.

Kingdomino with more complex scoring. I don't see it as an improvement.

Sounds like a game that could be excellent if it got a 2.0 redo. Or maybe some streamlined house rules.

That cube board should have just been a laminate sheet that you can check off with a dry erase marker. It would have been less fiddly and even evoked the mini golf feel of filling out a score card.

What an odd color choice. What mini golf course uses red turf?

Sounds like something I would like but nobody else would.

I have this and agree, great theme and course art but hard to get to the table. The teach is steep and everyone I’ve shared with has been scared away by the complexity of something that should be a fun casual game.

Enjoying seeing the next "wave" of Vasel's coming in to help Tom with some of these reviews and such.

Violet needs to die her hair black and gets some heavy black eyeliner. "I love watching people suffer, and making people miserable." Add in a little heavy metal and she would be all set I think. Haha. It's refreshing. Definitely makes me miss Sam and his blunt opinions.

For me it's a super fun game, I laminated some scoring sheets (I uploaded on bgg) and use a whiteboard marker for the holes and at the same time mark boxes from 1-36. You don't actually remove tiles for less players, the little extra score pad thing just shows the distribution of tiles per player. I agree about the more complex side as I always end up winning those. My wife and I just play the simple side. Of 145 game plays this year, 21 have been mini golf 😀

This is my dream. To be able to enjoy playing board games with my kids!

I love this game concept, the theme is cool and the drafting of tiles is nice, but when I saw it on kickstarter I thought it would not be streamlined enough. You just confirmed that. I hope they had enough success with this to take on feedback and streamline the game for a second edition a year or so down the road.

LOL I love it. "I like to steal other stuff and watch people fall apart." Tom: "Whose child are you?!" Her: "Yours."

My wife and I backed this. Our friends and us really enjoyed this game, but Tom does have valid points about the excessive scoring factors, and the art in the rule book and on the client (Mr & Mrs cards) is lame. That being said, it’s satisfying building the course, using exactly 36 cubes for the 9 holes, and being able to walk from the green to the next T. It’s unlikely I’ll ever play with the advanced scoring rules.

for me, there is an elephant in the room question:
Why on EARTH would the designer(s) think a minigolf course should have RED turf......when everyone knows it should be GREEN? WTH? Reeeeealy bothers me

Loves to hate draft 👌

This is pretty much my review. I opened the box and saw that rulebook and just said , "No!" The tiles are nice, though. That's one area where the publishers really listened to the Kickstarter comments. But it also seemed like ways to score kept getting added, or I just didn't notice this. I feel there should be less emphasis on things like people or benches and more on Mr and Mrs scoring and making sure your layout matches your required layout. It's like a messier version of Carcassonne, which I feel is too messy itself. House ruling will have to streamline this.

Some meaningless facts: Minigolf is very popular as a competitive sport in Europe. There are several types of courses, and it looks like these tiles are from Eternite courses. Which makes this a bit weird since the par on an eternite hole is 1. It's not extreme to hear about someone scoring 18 on an 18 hole eternite course. Maybe like bowling a 300.

I am a huge mini golf fan have played on hundreds of courses and I think this game does a great job of making it feel like I am designing one. Yes the quality could be better but it was cheaper to back so I am getting what I paid for. It could use an upgrade one day. The complexity is there, that is what it is. It is a more complex king domino. I love that fact that it is more complex.

Cutting walking from one hole to another, is an absolute no. How would want to play on a mini golf course where the holes aren’t in order. Could you imagine, dad where is hole 3, oh it’s over there we have to walk past hole 6 first.

The art might be an intentional throwback to like crappy game art from the 90s but yeah i can see it's so subjective

The turn order mechanic is a lot like Kingdomino.

Stands as a great example for a game that should have been streamlined significantly.

Tom: “I don’t steal from you guys that often”
Ruby: (face tells a completely different story)😂
Also agree Tom, that the game seems to be almost a little too busy. I would try it if someone else had it and wanted to play it but otherwise, I think I will pass on this one.

Also, I will point out the Mr. and Mrs. cards. (Que all the haters in the comments). While it may seem little or insignificant to others, the delineation of men look at course design but women look at benches and bushes. Very antiquated way of thinking to me. I understand having a course deck and a landscape deck for mechanic/scoring purposes, but it could have been just that. Or colored decks (which they already are). Could have been easy enough to put both Mr. and Mrs. in each course and landscape decks.

I like the inside artwork better than the box artwork. Pretty cool theme. Kind of gives me vibes of Barenpark meets Kingdomino although those are more compact and streamlined.

Great job girls!

That's how we felt about Isle of Cats, which Tom loved. Taking one cat meant considering your fish, baskets, room filling potential, adjacency, multiple scoring cards, treasure patches, future cats on your turns, and what your opponents might take. It was a ton for such a silly themed game, so we traded it away.

Actually, you should put all the tiles in the bag, no matter the number of players. The statistics sheet just tells you how many tiles of each type you can expect to get depending on the number of players.

I'm glad they added some flowers and benches for the ladies. Otherwise they would surely get bored and tired standing around watching the fellas play.

Honestly one of my favorite games I played last year. If not one of my top 10 of all time right now.

I understand the scoring being a lot but I love in the full version that you have the promise tokens that make it so you can choose to go after certain scoring or not. I think all the scoring and variety of cards makes for HUGE replay ability and have played it 5 times now and have played completely different games each time.

As a Father of a daughter I won't touch a game where all the male characters are interested in the manly course and the female characters are interested in girly flowers. The amount of women I know that care more about the flowers than the course are 0. Basic sexist tropes that we really need to get past

Ruby’s glasses don’t fit her. My mom is an optometrist and I learned from her that wearing glasses like this is so hard on your eyes. It’s essentially like wearing bifocals, but it’s highly unlikely she needs them so young. ❤️❤️

I felt the same way about this game. I was watching it on kickstarter and liked the concept but just could not get passed the art. It was great to see kids involved in the review.

This is definitely a game to try if you like the game Carcassonne and/or Ticket To Ride

We just got this to the table tonight and we all LOVED it 😊

They replaced the art/cards in a reprint/update to the game. I think the KS release had boards w/ indents for the cubes, but have to check that. There are a lot of tiles and I can only imagine how hard pulling a set number of tiles would be for lower counts. I think we just went with "all tiles" for our games and dealt with having to wait for stuff to come up.

youll be happy to know tom :
The most noticeable change of this Second Edition is the art style of the characters cards. All the character illustrations have been redrawn by Xiaolong, the artist of the box cover.