Sit Down, Magic Maze, Strategy Card Game, Ages 8+, 1-8 Players, 15+ Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

You may take any pawn on any space and move them to a portal on any tile that matches their color and symbol. Players may perform their actions whenever and as many times as they want using whichever adventurer they want. So players have to gauge how worth it it is to discuss strategy versus just running through the maze and hoping other players will get what you mean. I think they chose to use pawns because they’re easy to pick up and put down, but it would have been great if the characters actually looked like characters.

And time is running out – nobody is near an hourglass, and you wasted so much time on this discussion only to have it all fall apart in the first thirty seconds. This is a fantastic tool for ruining relationships, frustrating your wife, or for looking like a fool. For Magic Maze, my bailout point is ‘I can see why people enjoy it, but I really don’t want to play it again’. The tricky thing is that each player must form their own plan, and there’s not really a way to get everyone on the same page.If all of the Heroes escape without flipping the Theft Tile, then they find themselves empty handed and all players have failed. There’s only so much grist for the mill in ‘I was expecting you to do X but you didn’t and that meant I couldn’t do Y’.

The game’s brilliance is delivered through one simple rule; You can’t talk or communicate in anyway other than using the “Do Something Pawn.Sometimes it’s when the game stops showing you anything new – when you’ve got the feel of the thing nailed down and no surprises are left to be revealed.

All of the characters will begin the game on the starting tile and you will expose more tiles as the game progresses. Working together we need to uncover the map, get the characters their items, and escort them all to the exit. The “do something” pawn keeps the game fun and energetic without bogging down in feelings of futility. The first seven slowly introduce all of the rules of the game, and then the last 10 add in additional challenges.

It also allows “alpha gamer” quarterbacks–the bane of most cooperative games–an outlet for their direction of the other players without the annoyance of actually directing their moves. Each Hero reaches their respective exit space (the exit sign with the colour and symbol of the corresponding Hero Pawn) and when all four heroes reach their exits, you are free! Actions in the game are either moving pawns in a single orthogonal direction, moving pawns to their matching vortex spaces, moving pawns along escalators, or discovering new room tiles.

And a further wrinkle with the timer: whenever the timer is flipped, all players pass their actions to the left. The manual includes tutorial missions and then ramps up the difficulty as you become more in the game. Don’t get too used to this though – whenever the hourglass flips over, you’ll trade these off to another player like the world’s most frustrating game of pass the parcel. Before taking the final leap and turning the sand timer over you can talk strategies and plot quicker ways to escape, or if this is your fifth time setting up having failed four times consecutively, feel free to punch the walls or go outside and scream at pigeons. Magic Maze is a co-op game that effectively neutralises this by having everyone play in really time and not allowing them to talk!Fog of Love has a better tutorial, sure, but this is more of a “unlocking modules” as you play through, which keeps the games fresh. I play board games for the social interaction and Magic Maze puts a massive barrier in the way of that.