by W. Eric Martin

I've been accused of gross negligence in regard to the care and sorting of board game components, but I don't take the same devil-may-care approach with everything in my life.

The spice drawer in our home, for example, is organized alphabetically with handmade labels on each identical jar, with custom foam cushions along the back to hold everything in place. My garage shelves have items boxed and arranged by use: painting supplies on one shelf, cleaning supplies on another, gardening supplies on a third, and so on.

In some circumstances, sorting brings great comfort. I usually know where to find a particular comic, book, or movie, which is ideal for when I feel compelled to read or watch something from my past.

And while I think sorting game components is mostly a waste of time, sorting components as a game in itself can be spiffy, as with Hanabi, Ohanami, Rack-O, and Friedemann Friese's greatest game design to date — Finished!

However, the purest example of sorting as a game is probably Peter Jürgensen's Mandamina, a game I purchased at SPIEL Essen 24, then let sit for nine months before finally breaking it out. Why so long? No clue other than the general busyness of life.

I first learned of Mandamina through a designer diary Jürgensen submitted in 2023 to coincide with the game's release in Scandanvia through Martinex. The game concept seemed ideal for my tastes — Players work co-operatively to organize marbles in a grid without talking about why they're doing what they're doing — but I didn't pull the trigger on an overseas order. Thankfully, German publisher HCM Kinzel licensed the design, I took it home from Essen, and now I've played a half-dozen times.

To play, set up the 7x7 board by filling each space but the center one with 48 marbles — six each in eight colors. Take turns picking up a marble and moving it to the empty space.

If you ever group all marbles by color into orthogonally-connected groups, you've finished. Score five points for each different shape you've made with a group (with reflections and rotations being identical), score five bonus points if the empty space is in the center of the board, then subtract points equal to how many moves you took. If your score is positive, you win.

Alternatively, if you've taken forty-five turns, you can stop since the most you can score positively is 45 points, which means your final score won't be positive.

Mandamina is one of those "barely there" games in which it feels like the designer has taken some aspect of general life and applied a scoring system to it. You could be sorting LEGO bricks into containers or, yes, game components into tiny plastic bags, but
Mandamina is not that thanks to the arbitrariness of each color's "final" destination.

When you're staring at the starting layout above, what goes where? Where are the outlines of each color? What's your first move to reach that outcome? Me, I want to take advantage of the three gray in a Braille letter O, so I could remove the green amongst them to make room for a gray — but I wouldn't necessarily want to place the green in the center given the two in the lower left corner, so perhaps remove that light blue between the green first.

With three light blue in a diagonal line at upper left, maybe it's best to take one from their perimeter to make room for the light blue between the green to make room for the green amongst the gray...but which one along the perimeter?


Mandamina has the same appeal to me as something like The Mind (appreciation post) or The Game (appreciation post): You communicate with others solely through gameplay. One big difference, though, is that The Mind has a real-time aspect; one play is always the correct one to make, but no one knows whether they're the one who should play. The Game has hidden information, so I don't know whether I've "messed up" until I see my fellow player screw up their face in frustration.

Information in Mandamina is entirely open, yet that won't necessarily help. You might have an idea of what you want to do, but that won't necessarily overlay each other player's mental map of what the final layout should be — or maybe that's not how others will approach the game anyway. Maybe they're looking at only a few colors at a time, something I've learned from experience when a player moves a marble that makes no sense to me. What are they trying to do? What do they want me to do?!

That feeling comes through in life all the time, sometimes on a small scale, sometimes a global one. That driver isn't signalling. Are they turning? Are they waiting for me to go? That person's eying me. Do I remind them of someone? Do they like the way I look? Do I have something on my face? That politician cancelled a program I find important. Do they know something I don't? How do they view the role of government? What's their vision for society? What qualifies as winning in the world at large?


You could, of course, play Mandamina on your own, mapping out everything ahead of time to ensure that each move serves two purposes — emptying a space for one color, while grouping another — but that removes what I find appealing about the design: the quiet interaction among players. I'm not playing to reach the goal as quickly as possible; I'm playing because I get to share this challenge with others. We experience something small and definable together, a microcosm of life.

To play along and get a taste for what Mandamina is like in person, watch this video, even though it's a poor substitute:

Youtube Video