And now for something a little different: 4-player maze-running game, Cheese Chase—the Mechanical Board Game with a Living Maze.
The game is simple on the surface. On your turn, roll a die, move your mouse through the indicated number of squares without visiting the same space twice (no retracing your steps within one turn) and—obviously—without jumping over any walls. Your goal is to get to the centre of the maze, grab a wedge of cheese, and make it all the way back to your home space without losing it—other players can mug your mouse and steal the cheese!
The novel bit happens, er, under the surface…
After you’ve moved, you turn one of the wheels at the corner of the board. This will cause twelve of the twenty-four discs you can see on the board’s surface to rotate, along with the walls on top of them, such that the maze will be drastically reconfigured. However, while the maze does change every turn, the reconfiguration is deterministic, so could be predicted given sufficient motivation—perhaps it’s more a game for youngish children, who won’t be too critical.
This is the second Kickstarter project from Sergey Sharonin and his team; their previous project, a strange but nicely manufactured dice shaker was successful and demonstrates that they can certainly produce good-looking products—there are some very pretty game boards and accessories in their Etsy shop too.
This game looks solidly attractive, with cute 3d-printed playing pieces, and everything’s ‘meticulously [hand-]assembled and tested to ensure perfect dynamics and quality,’ which no doubt is the main contributor to the fairly high cost of the game.
A fair amount of manufacturing precision is required to ensure smooth rotation of so many moving parts, but based on Sharonin’s Etsy store, I reckon they’ve cracked that, though I do hope that wear and tear doesn’t result in stickiness or fouling further down the line.
To wrap up, this maze game certainly does look cute and well-made, and will definitely appeal to the young, or young at heart, but will the movement gimmick give it a measure of longevity?
About the Author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
