The postman recently dropped off a new board game for us to review from the Ravensburger collection - you may remember we reviewed Asara and Indigo a few weeks ago. The new addition to the Madhouse toy cupboard was Labyrinth, a game for 2-4 players aged 7-99, according to the box, although 4-year-old Pierre manages to play along quite happily, even if it's hit and miss rather than strategy as far as he is concerned !
Setting up the game is simple - you just randomly place the square tiles all over the board without trying to make pathways, then distribute the cards between the players.
The cards have various pictures on that relate to the world of fairytales (or Shrek, as Pierre seems to think !) which match up with the pictures on the board tiles.
The aim of the game is to move your figure around the board landing on the pictures on your cards. To do so, you need to create pathways by sliding the tiles. There are a number of yellow arrows around the edges of the board. These indicate the rows that you are allowed to slide, by pushing the extra tile onto the board, pushing the tile on the end of the row off so it becomes the new pusher - that all sounds really complicated but it's totally simple.
Older players will enjoy playing strategically, trying to plan ahead and then getting frustrated when another player pushes their row along and moves all the pathways ! Younger players just have fun sliding the tiles around haphazardly - and seem to have almost as much luck as those trying to use logic and tactics to win !
The only slight niggle is that the board surface isn't totally flat - there is a crease in the middle where it folds - which blocks the tiles when you try to slide a row so it took a bit of frustrating jiggling to get everything in position each time.
That didn't detract from the enjoyment though and we all had fun playing. It's one of those games where players of all ages have fairly even odds of winning which makes it more exciting, not to mention easier for the grown-ups because they don't have to "cheat" to help out younger players.
star rating : 4.5/5
RRP : £19.99
Disclosure : We received the game in order to write an honest review.
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Looks like a great game to have fun with!
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