![]() But Dorn is able to add just enough spice to make the game interesting. These mechanisms are simple and clever, but so far all we’re doing is walking around and collecting tiles. This is a fantastic system, and I wish something similar had been implemented in other great games with frustratingly small hand sizes. If you’re really excited about the new card in the middle, you’ll need to play both cards on one side of it to get to it as fast as possible. So while players can get going right away with a simple binary choice, advanced planning is required to maximize your efforts. New cards are always placed in the middle of the remaining 4 cards. Players have 5 cards in hand, each dictating how many spaces they can move, but they can only play the leftmost or rightmost card of their hand. It’s because they’re so easily intuited and internalized without noticing that they’re the hallmarks of great design.Īnd of course, players will likely be focused on the main “twist” of the game, which is how movement works. These are easily explained rules with big impact, they’re brilliant, but it can be hard to notice that. You also can’t just send one adventurer straight to the end and expect to win most treasure tiles require players to put several of their own adventuers on the tile together to claim it. This prevents a common issue with racing games, where the rich get richer once a player gets ahead. When players take a treasure tile from the board, the empty space is “no longer” part of the board, in the sense that players skip that tile when counting how far their adventurers move. While set collection is a fairly standard concept, Dorn is able to do a lot with a little here, as he often does. Players vie for the most points, and while the final treasure chamber provides quite a few, players are also collecting sets of treasure, and are awarded points for each of their five adventurers and how far they make it into the temple. Like many other modern racing games, getting to the ultimate treasure first doesn’t necessarily guarantee a victory. The $60 MSRP price tag is high, but there’s admittedly a lot of stuff in this box. And Luxor’s artwork is quite nice, though I’m most impressed with how chunky all of the cardboard pieces are. On the other hand, it’s a popular theme for a reason: it gives the players a clear sense of what they’re doing thematically, and it feels exotic and exciting. This theme is fairly overused: it’s already been used by the publisher ( Escape: The Curse of the Temple), the designer ( Karuba), and even a Spiel nominee the year prior ( The Quest for El Dorado). In Luxor, players are adventurers racing to find treasure inside an ancient temple. But what about the third game? In 2018, both Azul and The Mind became smash hits in the board gaming world, but it seems like many gamers have let Luxor pass them by. The winner is guaranteed a huge boost in sales and notoriety, and often one of the runner-ups sees an explosion of success. Every year, three games are nominated for the Spiel des Jahres, Germany’s Family Game of the Year.
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