Some Magic for the Kids

A friend of mine has been on the prowl recently for games will one day be good to play with his young son when he's older. But for the sake of both of them, he wants them to be good games. No Candy Land, no Game of Life. Good EuroGames a kid could grasp but that an adult won't find torturous to play. He's decided that winners of the "Kinderspiel des Jahres" are probably a good place to start, so he picked up the 2009 winner, The Magic Labyrinth. And indeed, it was a good selection.

The idea is simple. You assemble a maze, using bits of wood for the walls that fit into a tray. Then you cover the maze with a "ceiling" that is the actual play board, a grid of spaces with symbols on them. Each player places a pawn on top of the board, starting in a corner, and under the board he places a marble held in position by a magnet on the bottom of the pawn.

On your turn, you move through the unseen maze, trying to reach various symbols on each of the spaces. But if you move into a wall, the marble you don't see will be knocked free from your pawn, and you have to start again from the corner. Trial and error on your own turns -- and careful observation of your opponent's turns -- will eventually reveal the shape of the maze beneath the board. The player who accumulates the most chips (for reaching the most symbols -- along the lines of Ricochet Robot) is the winner.

It's simple but fun. It plays very quickly. It's easily scalable in difficulty, just by building a more or less complex labyrinth to hide beneath the game board. Luck does play a role, mainly in terms of whether a player's pawn is already near the next "target symbol" drawn for the players to reach. And certainly, in the absence of much true strategy, it might be more accurate to call this a "puzzle" or something rather than a game. But whatever is, it's definitely enjoyable. A perfect way to pass 10 or 15 minutes while waiting for more players to arrive on a game night.

Or a perfect game to play with a young child.