Where to begin…
Labyrinth is a game that has been around for forty years and was a staple in many a family’s board game collection for most of that time being a great alternative to some of the other big names such as Monopoly and Cluedo. The concept is quite simple. There is a grid of tiles that make up the titular maze and on your turn you are taking a tile, pushing it into one of the rows or columns and then moving your character in order to find treasure. The first to find all of their lost treasure wins the game. The excitement came from watching another player change the layout without realising it gave you a direct line to that precious gold! The simplicity also meant that it had real family appeal, giving you decisions to make but not allowing you to plan very far ahead. Since its creation there have been many crossover versions from Pokemon to Harry Potter but now comes Labyrinth Carcassonne, merging with another modern classic that also centres on creating roads (albeit around a French town rather than a mystical castle!), so is this match as fantastique as it sounds?
Left Turn…
Taking the basic mechanism of Labyrinth, we are still taking one tile and pushing it into the central grid. This pushes out another tile, but instead of it joining a communal area like the original, it now comes to you, the player, which leads us into the most interesting element to this new collaboration. Carcassonne is a city builder, one of the original city builders and so it wouldn't be a Carcassonne game without offering you a chance to build a city. Unlike the original, you are instead building your own personal city in front of you, using the tiles you push out of the central grid. The rules of this follow the placement restrictions you will recognise, roads must connect to roads, fields to fields and city to city. When a road or city is completed, instead of points, you get rewards based on the icons on that road or city. For every shield you get a shield token and for every treasure you get a matching treasure token, and tokens are important!
Right Turn…
Once you have taken your tile, you can move your meeple around the central grid. You will all start in the centre and can then move along any connected roads as you make your way towards treasure tiles. In front of you are a stack of personal tiles, each with a treasure icon on it. In order to play the current top tile you need to get to the relevant treasure tile in the centre. Only then can you place your personal tile into your city. The more of these you can do then the bigger your city will become. This isn’t generally too difficult and we found that in most games, each player could place most if not all of their personal supply. Racing through them doesn’t seem to offer any extra bonus which could have been nice to add a little agency. It would also mean you would care more about where everyone else might be trying to move to creating a more dynamic interaction when placing tiles into the central maze. That said though, the extra complexity of not only caring how you change the central roads, but deciding which tiles you want to push out to help your city building is a fun little piece of crunch that elevates this version about the original of either game.
Straight On…
Finally the game comes with a module that adds quests which add the tiniest bit of extra complexity. There are a number of cards that are placed out in the central area all rewarding specific things such as completing roads that are four tiles long or cities that are three tiles big. As soon as you complete one of these quests you can take some shield tiles and the nice thing about this is it adds a sense of agency to the game, a race to get the biggest stack of shield tokens first and will a handful of cards, it adds a lovely element of replayability.
Then comes the final scoring. This is the only element of the game that I kind of struggle with. At the end of the game, all players stack all the tiles and tokens in their city into one pile and place their meeple on top. Then one player gets to replace their meeple with a larger crown piece based on one of several scoring cards, for example if you had the most shield tokens. Finally, the tallest stack wins the game. My feeling is that this might appeal to a younger player but it left the adults I played with a little cold. I have confidence in the design that it is balanced and fair but it always felt a little strange as a climax. But that was the only sticking point in an otherwise fun game.
If you like either of the original titles then this is a great combination, offering something new but if you are coming to this completely fresh then it is a great introduction to both classic titles and makes for a fantastic family game.
Score: 80%
Artwork: 3/5
Player interaction: 3/5
Complexity: 2/5
Replayability: 4/5
Component quality: 3/5
You might like:
● If you like Labyrinth then this certainly offers the same feeling
● If you like Carcassonne then you get the same puzzle at it’s heart
● A fun family game that younger players will enjoy
You might not like:
● Not much complexity
● The scoring system is divisive
● Can’t plan much due to the ever changing board
