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

Product Information

Usually in ending a review like this I’d say something like ‘I’ve had some fun playing this under the right circumstances’.

Well a simple set of four characters drawn of the archetypes of the RPG world – a dwarf, an elf, a sorcerer and a barbarian. 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. Codenames at its best gives you something to talk about even if it does require long periods of intense cogitation in place of the conversation for which you might have been hoping.

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. The tricky thing is that each player must form their own plan, and there’s not really a way to get everyone on the same page. I reviewed Escape: The Curse of the Temple (the game that most people think of when they first see Magic Maze) favorably when it was released, but I have since lost interest in it because frequent play resulted in a kind of rote exercise that made the spark of fun from the early forays and failures disappear.

However, they are a nice addition if you need them, and they do distinguish the pieces one from another. All photos on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4. The great thing about using them (other than getting more time that is) is that you are allowed to talk. The players are definitely working together, but even so, if there are five players at the table, there might be five plans for what is the best course of action.As you get better at doing so the game will throw scenarios at you designed to make it harder for you to escape. Sure there are sandtimers on the board which allow you to turn the timer, but that’s it and if the sand runs out it’s game over.