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

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These times are necessary, but they are never long enough because the sand is flowing during these mini-discussions, and players aren’t allowed to touch any pieces–if they do, talking time is over. But what Michael saw that nobody else did is that the only way to find the orange exit is with a green explore action.

Here are some of our more lighthearted things to show we're not all about the Serious Business of games. My recommendation, if you are not playing with anyone who is color blind, is to remove these stickers. If it makes you feel better, there are 17 Scenarios in the base game of Magic Maze; my group has managed to get up to (but not beat) Scenario 6. This game is a favourite at The Treehouse and is pretty much guaranteed to be an exhilarating and high-adrenaline experience.

And a further wrinkle with the timer: whenever the timer is flipped, all players pass their actions to the left. You might be focused on the theft, others on the logistics of revealing greater amounts of the stack.

Some Action Tiles have more than one symbol; you may use any or all of the Actions pictured on the tile (and honestly should). When you flip the hourglass, everyone gets to talk for as long as they like – but the sand keeps on running.

Magic Maze requires players to pay attention to what’s happening and to formulate a plan to get the adventurers where they need to be. Not like any other game I’ve played before, it’s really good fun and gets you thinking and playing in a new way. Give each player a tile (I’ll explain what the tiles do later), and have players with tiles with the same symbol sit across the table from each other, rather than adjacent.

I’ve played it four players with two separate groups and the most enthusiastic anyone has been so far is to say, ‘I don’t know – it’s okay!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. As for Scenario 3, well, that one’s too much fun for me to tell you about, so you’ll have to discover it on your own. Codenames at least manages to convert silence into something that can later be the grist for more refined conversation after the fact. It forces you to be creative and think differently, which is the main reason why I’m a big fan of this one. What ends up happening is that everyone, when they can talk, desperately tries to balance speed of conversation against its information content and that leads to people talking over each other and misunderstanding plans.

It would be a beautiful story of redemption except that the sudden aortic expansion would just bring on a massive and potentially lethal heart attack. Although by then we played through all of the scenarios – some a couple of times – and everyone either enjoyed their time playing or was too stressed to speak badly of the game.Take the big ‘do something’ pawn and bang it in front of them, gavel style, like a passive-aggressive judge with a penchant for mime. These scenarios will keep the game fresh, especially as players become accustomed to what they need to do. For Magic Maze, my bailout point is ‘I can see why people enjoy it, but I really don’t want to play it again’.