Minecraft Explorers card game

Minecraft Explorers was a fun find at Walmart.  We almost never go there, but our George Foreman Grill broke and after some mean not-so-lean ground turkey spit grease all over Anne, we had to go find a new one.  While we were there, we found the game.  

I trust titles by Ravensberger though they do tend to have a step more complexity than we prefer.  When I looked it over at home, I wasn't expected the huge two-sided rule sheet.  That sheet was printed separately in 6 languages so we chuckled the ones that were not EN.  The cards had so many icons and numbers I worried that Anne would just be annoyed by it .

I ended up watching a solo walk-through which helped make sense of that double-sided page of rules.  I was able to explain it and we got through the games.

I'm not sure how useful a brief explanation will be.   Watch the video.  Overall, the layout has a row of chest cards,  a row for monster cards, two rows for biome cards, and then each player has their own hand of cards.

The flow is (briefly): take the actions cards (6 hunger cards and the night card).  Spend the hunger cards on various actions:
- take biome cards based on their hunger cost
- fight of a monster card based on its cost
- play one hunger to remove and replace any number of biome cards
- play one hunger card to put any number of your items into chests

Then play the night card, which flips a mob card and ends your turn.

The mob deck has some extra rules.  If you draw a mob already shown,  draw again until you get a different one.   Since you hide the GAME OVER card in one of the bottom 3 cards of the mob deck,  you need to keep the visible mobs cleared out.

When you fight a mob, you get to keep it in your hand -- well, the mess of cards in from of you -- and a matching pair of defeated mobs will count as one hunger.

Some biome cards will trigger a mob.   Filling a chest will remove a mob.

Various item cards have abilities like the armor that can block the flipping of a mob card,  the crossbow that can remove two mob cards,  and more.

So,  yes, it was more complex that I was expecting, but it's a cooperative game so we had fun getting through the cards together.   There were difficulty settings (add more chests), and slight changes for different numbers of players, so it doesn't feel like it will get boring with repetition. It should be playable as a solo game as well.