- Designers: Max J. Kobbert, Klaus-Jürgen Wrede
- Artists: Marcel Gröber, Franz-Georg Stämmele
- Publishers: Hans im Glück, Ravensburger AG
- Players: 1 – 4
Looking at the cover of ‘Carcassonne Labyrinth’ you would guess that this is simply a re-themed Labyrinth, similar to the Star Wars or Harry Potter editions, but this is actually a genuine mash-up of the two classic games.
To put this review in context, Carcassonne is one of my favourite games of all time. Whether I am playing a casual game with the family, a cut-throat two player game online, or puzzling out the excellent official solo variant, I adore Carcassonne.
I also have a soft spot for Labyrinth – mainly as I love mazes – though I find that the experience of playing the game falls short of the idea of it. The game can feel a frustrating slog, as your plans are constantly undone by the time everyone else has taken their turn, making it feel as though your success is entirely dependent on luck.
So how does Carcassonne Labyrinth compare? Well, I am pleased to say that for the most part it is highly successful.
As in Labyrinth, players have a stack of treasures to find in the maze of roads and cities, though this time instead of cards they have Carcassonne tiles.
Each turn, players take a tile from a central stack and push it into the Labyrinth. They then move their meeple along the labyrinth’s roads. If they reach one of the immovable tiles depicting their treasure they can then add their treasure tile to their personal Carcassonne landscape. Whether they found a treasure or not they then take the tile that popped out the other side of the row they pushed and add that to their landscape as well.
Unlike Carcassonne, players do not score points simply for completing features. Instead, if they complete a feature, they count the number of shields and treasures in that feature and add corresponding tokens to the tiles.
The game ends when everyone has placed 10 tiles. Scoring is both novel and fiddly. Instead of counting points, players stack their tiles on tokens on top of each other and place their meeple on top (or, if you are the player that collected the most shields, you place a taller crown meeple). The highest tower is declared the winner. It’s certainly an ingenious and cute way of scoring, and avoids players having to count all their tiles, but it’s fiddly to stack the towers and align them all for comparison.
There are also a series of challenge cards you can include, which award additional shield tokens for doing things like building cities or roads of a certain size, joining roads in a circle, or building a 4×4 grid.
The solo game is essentially identical to the multiplayer game except the scoring criteria for the cards differs slightly and you get to measure your tower with a cardboard ruler!
So how well does this all work? Well, I think it does what it sets out to do very well, both multiplayer and solo.
Labyrinth is essentially here in its entirety. The mechanics are identical to the original game except for the fact that when you push a tile into the maze you are thinking about what you are going to do with the tile that is pushed out, not what the next player will do with it. It makes the board a mechanism for tile selection as much as it is a labyrinth to navigate, especially as the smaller board and central crossroads make retrieving treasures much easier here than ‘Labyrinth’.
This makes for an interesting puzzle, as you need to ensure that you collect a treasure almost every turn while not missing the opportunity to push out tiles you can make immediate use of.
I say ‘immediate use of’ because the game is short (solo games can play out in 15-20 minutes) so it is very risky to build large features. This is where the game differs most from Carcassonne. In this game, features are worth nothing in themselves, instead points are only scored for the tokens depicted on them. This requires a different mind set, in which the impulse to build and expand is often detrimental, as it is all too easy to push your luck too far, even with quite small features.
I find Carcassonne Labyrinth fascinating. It genuinely combines elements of both games together in a way that paradoxically makes it feel like both games, and at the same time like neither. The Labyrinth elements are all there, but the labyrinth is a mechanism, not the focus. The Carcassonne mechanisms are all there but the puzzle is very different.
It is possible that if you are a big fan of either game that Carcasses Labyrinth might disappoint, as the thing you loved most about either game might be missing in this mash up. But I personally feel that Carcassonne Labyrinth does a great job of standing on its own two feet. It is very much its own game, while distinctly a child of its parents.
Also worth noting – official rules have been created to use the tiles and tokens as an expansion to Carcassonne. I’ve not yet had the chance to try them but they look interesting, and seem to retain the flavour of this game.
Carcassonne Labyrinth is a great family game, and whilst not as taxing a solo game as some might like, it is undeniably fun and perfect as a quick and addictive puzzle, so receives a definite recommendation from me.
