Saturday!

Visiting friends, they slammed down a board game and told me that I was going to like this one. It’s a little game called Labyrinth (no relation to the amazing Jim Henson movie).

The game is simple. You are one of up to four wizards in a maze (choose the red one, the yellow one, the blue one, or the green one) and you are given a hidden hand of treasures (a ring, maybe… a spider, maybe… a crown maybe…) dealt from a deck. You can’t look at what you’ve been dealt, only the top one (and keep it hidden… other people might try to mess with you). It’s your job to navigate the labyrinth and collect the treasures you’ve been assigned.

The labyrinth itself is where the mechanics of the game get really interesting. The board itself is a four by four grid of tiles with enough space between to snugly hold a tile between them. See here:

The tiles are then shuffled and randomly placed face down on the board by the youngest person at the table. Because, you know. That’s what the youngest person at the table is for. (After all of the tiles are placed, there is one extra.) Then all of the tiles are flipped over. The tiles will have treasures printed on them. Once all the tiles are flipped, the maze is drawn and the person who goes first takes the extra tile and slides it through one of the three lanes (pushing the last tile off the board). The person who pushed the tiles then moves his wizard anywhere within the labyrinth where the hallway allows. If you land on top of the treasure you know about from what you’ve been dealt, flip it over, show everybody, and then look at the next card in your deck and start planning to get that one as you hand the extra tile to the next player.

After you get all of your treasures, you just have to make it back to your home tile (also your starting tile). The only additional rule is that you cannot just shove back the tile to recreate how the maze looked a turn ago. You have to move a new lane.

Oh my gosh, this game is so much fun. Trying to figure out how to best move from this side of the map to that side, how to get from this lane to that lane, and how to kinda hide where you’re trying to go at the same time as trying to thwart where your opponents are trying to go? That’s just a great way to kill a half hour with friends and family.

If you’ve been looking for a good game to play with the neighbors when they come over or to play with the kids on a rainy day? You need to check this one out.

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]