A Pharaoh to Remember

Mask of the Pharaoh is a bit of an odd duck that straddles the line between game and group activity. (It also straddles names; before Hasbro bought and re-issued it, it was originally released under the title Mask of Anubis.)

You download an app to your phone that will simulate a view standing inside a cartoonish Egyptian tomb, placing your phone inside a mask that will create a 3D effect when you look inside. (For spectators, it creates the appearance of you putting a dog-headed Anubis mask over your eyes. A+ for flavor there.)

You get one minute to look at a fixed position inside the tomb, but you can rotate in all directions to describe everything you see in a 360-degree panorama -- the junctions of the passages, any adornments hanging on the walls, and so forth. As you describe, all other players use a series of jigsaw-style pieces to try to assemble an overhead map of what you're seeing.

When the minute is up, you pass the mask to the next player, who is then dropped into a separate location inside the same tomb and then gets a minute to describe what they see. You get seven views in total, and if everyone is good enough and thorough enough at describing what they see, a clear picture will come together of the entire tomb -- you'll figure out where the different parts of the maze adjoin, and reveal an unbroken path from the starting point to a throne deep inside. If you do this successfully, your group wins. If not... well, try again (perhaps on an easier difficulty setting).

The endeavor takes, as you would imagine, just upward of seven minutes (one minute per view). But you'll immediately want to play again, so don't expect this to just be 10 minutes and done. It has a viral quality to it too. It came out on a recent game night where the group was large enough to split in half, and the people who had opted for the more conventional strategy game had moments of envy glancing over at the group playing with the Egyptian mask.

But the fun it brings is limited. It isn't a super-deep experience; there are only so many things you can find adorning the walls of the tomb, and the "gameplay" (to the extent it feels like a game at all) is very limited. The more you play, the more you and your friends develop a shorthand and the whole thing becomes much less challenging. Simply, the half-life on this thing is quite brief. I was glad to have played it, and I also kind of expect not to play it again -- not for not wanting to exactly, but because I doubt it will ever be anyone's top suggestion.

I'd give Mask of the Pharaoh a B-. Perhaps if a more robust game had been grafted onto the concept, it would be something to recommend. As it stands, a party game group (with spatially-oriented people) will probably mine it for a bit of fun before moving on.