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

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You, and only you, have mastered teleportation and are able to send the Hero Pawns hurtling through a vortex.

And a further wrinkle with the timer: whenever the timer is flipped, all players pass their actions to the left. Magic Maze feels like that to me – a game that expects me to delight in miscommunication and misunderstandings. Guard: a Hero and a Guard cannot stand or pass through a Mall tile where the other type of pawn is standing. The Dwarf will be able to pass through small passages that no one else can; the Elf allows players to talk when he explores; the Mage can add two new tiles anywhere in the mall; and the Barbarian is able to turn off security cameras, which are found on new tiles that you’ll use from Scenario 7 onward. The green pawn, when exploring from a green space, also permits a few moments of snatched conversation.

Beyond this, players do not control pawns but actions, and these actions are micro, often as simple as moving a pawn in a single direction. Especially when you egg the person on by casually tapping the pawn while you’re waiting for them to act. Magic Maze has a punctuated rhythm to it that combines periods of intense silence with moments of raucous frantic discussion. In ideal circumstances you’re not so much sacrificing the social side of the game as you are boiling it until the lid blasts off and kills someone.

They have somehow lost their weapons and equipment, so, obviously, they decide to rob the local mall. Each player will receive a tile or tiles, depending on player count, with a direction and/or action on them. I think a theme similar to the one used in Professor Evil and the Citadel of Time would have worked well here. This cookie is used to a profile based on user's interest and display personalized ads to the users. A pawn is moved and then everyone goes silent and starts acting contrary to what everyone else thought had been agreed.

Silence is a tricky beast to harness in a game – it needs to act like steam building pressure in an engine. 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. It’s not just about seeing what they are doing, but the game becomes about anticipating and incorporating likely moves into your strategy, and waiting to help other players where you can so you can accomplish a shared goal. Just in front of them; no using it to signal that you want them to use an action (if their Action Tile has more than one).