A Gaming Treasure?

I feel like in my gaming circle at least, board game designer Rüdiger Dorn doesn't get as much credit as he deserves. He's designed a number of great games, including one or two that we play fairly regularly, and yet his name is not always on my lips if I start rattling off prolific and well-known designers. But I got a recent reminder when I played one of Dorn's newer creations, Luxor.

In Luxor, players control teams of tomb raiders trying to collect the best treasure from a game board that spirals deeper inside an Egyptian pyramid. A turn is straightforward: play a card, choose one of your team members, and move them deeper into the tomb. But there are a number of mechanisms in the game that make that simple framework quite interesting.

First, there's the collection method. Each space on the board is loaded with a tile at the start of the game. While some present permanent "points of interests" with special game rules (which creates uncertainty and variety during each play), most are treasures with a number of icons indicating how many pawns of one player's color must be present to take the token. You have to play a card with an exact number to reach any given space, so there's often a gamble involved. Just because an opponent has one pawn present on a treasure that requires two doesn't mean they'll absolutely beat you to the punch. Maybe they don't have the card they need to play. Or maybe you should just look elsewhere to a different treasure onto the board.

As you go deeper into the tomb, you receive additional workers to place at the start and increase the size of your team. Movement of those pieces gets easier too: once a treasure is claimed from a space, the space becomes empty and is skipped over during play, making it faster to get deeper into the tomb. Or maybe you want to use your new pieces to tag some of those permanent points of interest on the way in?

Playing cards to move also uses an interesting system. Each player has a five card hand that must be kept in strict order. On your turn, you can only play one of the two cards on the "outsides" of that hand of five. Then the new card you draw is inserted into the center position, pushing the other cards slowly toward the fringes. It's a little tricky, but in exchange for fighting the urge to reorganize your hand, the game gives you an intriguing way of planning ahead. Yet despite the planning potential, analysis paralysis is kept to a minimum, since you can only play one of two cards on any given time (and that in turn will lead to one of two cards you'll be able to play next turn).

There are a variety of scoring systems in the mix, though I haven't played Luxor enough to have a sense of whether this is a "focus on only some" game or a "pay attention to them all" game. There's collecting sets of treasure types, tagging certain points of interest with your pawns on the way in, and endgame scoring for getting each pawn as deep into the tomb as you can (with a special bonus for being first or second to reach the center).

Luxor isn't quite operating at a "you could teach your non-gaming friend to play this" level of simplicity, but it is a pretty easy rules set that nevertheless contains a fairly satisfying amount of strategy. I'd give it a B+. It's perhaps not "another instant classic" from Rüdiger Dorn, but it is a solid and fun design I'd happily play again.