My wife, not a big gamer, saw The Amazing Labyrinth at Barnes and Nobles and decided she just had to have it. Excited about playing (don't see that from her very often!) she hurried the twin three-year-olds to bed on-time tonight so that we could get a game in with our nine-year-old and our six-year-old. What follows is a review of how it went with two kids who were more than ready to play.
I took a moment to read the rules prior to to bringing the other folks into the room. Generally I digest the game before bringing the kids in, and I had recently tried having them open the package with me when I introduced Lucky Loop, with less than wonderful results. So I went back to standard operating procedure and reviewed all the materials (and punched out the cards and tiles) beforehand.
But frankly, given the simplicity of the rules, this likely wasn't necessary, even with a six-year-old in the mix. The rules for Amazing Labyrinth are quite simple, and the rulebook is well written save for three minor flaws which I shall mention in a moment.
The board consists of a set of fixed tiles in a waffle-pattern, which can be clearly seen in image 94599 shown here:
These tiles are part of the game board, but not painted on -- they are actual tiles that have been glued to the underlying board.
At the beginning of the game additional tiles are added in the blank areas between, and are free to move from turn to turn. These tiles are the same height as the ones affixed to the game board, so what results is a random board that generally connects much of the pathways together into a few big paths, but also includes scraps of paths that are short. An example of a filled-in board is shown in image 64615 shown here:
Note that there is one additional tile left over once the board is filled. This is an important part of the unique mechanic of Amazing Labyrinth.
At the beginning of the game each player receives cards. This is flaw number one in the rules, although only a minor one. The rules do not specify how many cards each player gets, merely that they get cards. We chose to take three cards each as we were short for time and it seemed like a reasonable guess for a 30 minute game. It turned out to be about right. Each player leaves their cards face down in front of them in a pile, only looking at the first one when the game play begins. 386
On each card is a picture of something that also appears on the maze tiles -- a set of keys, a bag of gold, a dragon, etc. The player's goal is to move their game piece over the picture in the maze that appears on their card. Once they have reached the first card's goal, they turn over their second card and then move on from there until they have achieved all of their cards. Once the cards are complete they must return to their starting position at the corner of the board to win the game. Simple enough. Note there is an optional kid's rule which allows them to look at all of their cards and choose which one they want to go after first. My wife and I used the big people rule and let the kids use the kid's rule. This is a nice way to handicap a player in the game and made things closer for us. I recommend a similar approach if you play with your kids.
On each turn, the player first takes the leftover tile and inserts it somewhere along the edge of the board. That is, they use it to push a row or column of tiles one position to the left or right, up or down. That leftover tile now becomes part of the board, the tile that falls off the board on the far side becomes the "leftover" tile, and the maze has magically changed, sometimes quite dramatically. It is important to note that rows and columns with the fixed tiles cannot be moved -- only every other row and every other column are available for this adjustment.
Once the player has adjusted the board via this truly curious mechanism, they are free to move their game piece anywhere along the pathways that are connected to their piece's current position. Naturally, each player attempts to change the maze in such a way that it provides their piece with an opening to their current goal -- whatever image appears on their current card. Having the maze change to snooker one of the other players is a nice bonus as well, but in our first game we discovered that simply moving the maze to help ourselves was sufficient challenge for any particular turn.
Minor flaw in the rulebook number 2 comes up at this point -- the user is required to move the board regardless of whether it will help them or not. Our edition of the rules does not indicate that it is the board that must move and not the player's piece, but the rule was easy enough to interpret given its context, once a bit of scrutiny was applied. 597