Mijnlieff Board Game First Impressions

Mijnlieff, That’s Mine-Leaf to you and me.

A game where you tell your opponent where to play.

Imagine noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) but with the need to think several moves ahead and with each piece having a particular power and control over your opponent. This is Mijnlieff. Try to create the most lines of 3 counters in your colour.

Played on a 4×4 grid, you have 8 tiles, 2 of 4 different types. You take turns playing one trying to get as many ‘3-in-a-row-‘ as possible.

When you play a tile, it determines where your opponent can play depending on which tile you placed…

Tile Abilities

The symbols do the following…

Plus-Sign – Known as Straights, your opponent must play a tile in any empty space orthogonally from the played tile, anywhere in the row.

Cross – Known as Diagonals… Same as Straights, but diagonally… obviously 🙂

Square in a Complete Circle – Known as Pullers, any space adjacent to the played tile.

Square in a Broken Circle – Known as Pushers, any space not adjacent, the opposite of a Puller.

This back a forth continues until everyone has played all their tiles or you can’t play anymore. That’s the trick really. Stop your opponent from getting lines of 3 by stopping them from being able to play. If they can’t play you get to place a tile anywhere and they miss a turn, putting them behind.

You then try and score rows yourself by essentially ‘locking out’ your opponent…

You get 1 point for each row of 3, most points win.

Mijnlieff Summary

Very simple and nice game… you can probably play best of 21 in 20 minutes once you know what you’re doing.

The balance of trying to score vs blocking your opponent is great and you need to be careful towards the end of the round because good play can shut out 2-3 of your tiles quite easily.

There is a free app that I’d love to talk about but it doesn’t seem to want to open right now, but it probably won’t replace the look and feel of the wooden pieces.

Jesta ThaRogue