Hisashi Hayashi’s new city-building game Minerva will be published by Pandasaurus Games, who plans to release the game next March.

Set during the height of the Roman Empire, Minerva challenges players to guide the development of an imperial city.  In the end, the most prosperous city will be the winner.  Players must manage their resources and gold in order to construct military and cultural buildings in their cities, but must not neglect the needs of their citizens as buildings without inhabitants offer no benefits.

Minerva was originally published in Japan in 2015, further cementing Hayashi’s reputation as a designer of thoughtful strategy games (his earlier credits include Trains, Yokohama, and Rolling Japan).  The Pandasaurus version of the game will feature new artwork by fan favorite Franz Vohwinkel (Targi, Samurai, San Juan).  The game includes 134 building tiles, 10 marker tiles, 24 culture tiles, 16 glory tiles, and 251 tokens.  It is intended for 1 to 4 players, and takes about an hour and a half to play.  MSRP is $40.00.

Pandasaurus is funding the production of Minerva through a Kickstarter campaign which easily soared past its $10,000 funding goal in the first few hours, attracting $21,339 from 374 backers as of this writing, with 30 days remaining (an average of $57.06 per backer).

This August, Pandasaurus will release Dinosaur Island, created by Jon Gilmour and Brian Lewis (see “Pandasaurus Heads for ‘Dinosaur Island’”).