Board? Game Review-Labyrinth



One excellent picture, freshly ripped off of Amazon.com

 Labyrinth. The word brings to mind a twisting maze of stone and rock, with the rapid thuds of the Minotaur's hoved feet booming through the torchlight corridors...

That is, if you have a PhD in Greek Mythology. To the rest of us, our mind fires a blank in the face of such an unspellable nine letter word. Games like Labyrinth take something as appealing as sandwich mold and sterilize it for our young minds. Just look at the box art. The HUMAN SKULL looks like it's going to invite you in for tea and crumpets! (What the heck is a crumpet, anyway?) All this in the spirit that turned the Grimms' story Rapunzel into Tangled and Cinderella into a movie with a G rating.

Rant about children's stories aside, onward.


Most of the tiles on the board are mobile, and on your turn you move a row or column by pushing the spare tile in, shoving another tile off the other side, which is sort of shown in the picture. Then you move your man, trying to get to the next  object shown on your card. Sounds simple, right?
No. Execution is difficult, and takes a bit of brain-power to wrap your mind around.


Pros
Unique idea.
Easy to learn, hard to master.
Plenty of room for messing with your friends' plans, intentionally or not.
Catches the chaos of the Labyrinth. The more players, the more chaos.
Decent artwork, nice miniatures.
Should work well with kids. (I don't know, I don't have kids to play it with)

Cons
Cute. Happy. Fluffy. Bah, humbug.
Almost impossible to plan ahead.
The more you think, the longer your turn, but you win.

Carl Strikes Back

So, I've got a new update schedule. Wait for it.

Here it comes...

Once A Month!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to actually try and update on a reasonable schedule. Once a month, probably in the middle of the month, although I've thrown that all out the window by putting all this up right now. Oh well.

Enjoy the review, which I blew the dust off of and put it online. Seriously, it's been a draft for about three months.

Card Game Review-Dominion

Dominion is a very unique game.  It's a card game, but instead of having a deck that everyone draws from, each player has their own personal deck that they build up by buying cards, the point of the game being to build the most efficient deck possible in order to buy the most Victory Cards before the game ends.  On your turn, you draw 5 cards, play any action cards from your hand that you want to, and buy 1 card, using treasure cards from your hand.  You then discard everything you didn't use and draw a new hand from your deck.  Action cards-which you don't start with, you must buy them and wait for them to shuffle back to you in your deck-do a variety of things, but mostly add on to the basics of what you can do, such as buying a larger number of cards, being able to play more action cards, or just giving you more treasure for this turn.

What the heck, I'm just going to make a Pros and Cons thing and have done with it.

Pros:
An insane amount of replayability
Well-designed
Moves quickly, as you can plan your turn during others' turns
Medium amount of complexity, fits everyone well

Cons:
Some kooky art amidst the awesome, including completely different styles
Small amount of player interaction
Officially only 2-4 players (Dominion: Intrigue, a stand-alone game, adds official rules for up to 6)

One of the best games I've played.