LogFAQs > #934022460

43. Magic Maze (2018)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Restricted communication, point-to-point movement, dungeon-crawling, tile-laying, real-time
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 5-15 minutes
Experience: 20+ games over 6-10 sessions with 3-6 players (2018-2020)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Four pawns explore a shopping mall, tile by tile. One player doesn't control one pawn; rather, each player controls all pawns, but can only move them in certain directions and take certain actions, like laying tiles and going up/down escalators. Other players move them in the other directions and take the other actions. The goal is to lay out enough tiles that each pawn can go to its "base" location, then escape the mall by going to its specific exit. The game is played in real time with a sand timer with no talking, except when you turn the timer by going on timer spots. As you advance in the game, you add more tiles to increase the number of tiles you need to explore, as well as rules that can help or hinder you.

Design - Real-time games are naturally frenetic. Magic Maze adds to the madness by preventing any single player from doing anything without coordination. It also prevents players from talking and instead hands them a red wooden piece that you place very passive-aggressively in front of other players to indicate "Do something!!!" Which pawn should you do something about, if someone puts it in front of you? You'll have to figure that out. Granted, this results in various levels of cheating as can often happen in co-op games that are designed to be unintuitive and restrictive toward communication, but that (as often is the case) adds to the hilarity. To be fair, the game anticipates this chaos and encourages you to laugh along with it - the rulebook is fairly forgiving about the inevitable cheating, and for god's sake, the theme is that an elf, a wizard, a dwarf, and a mage get together to... rob a shopping mall.

On the flip side of the chaos is the sublime. This happens for all counts, but especially at two, you can really get locked in. If you can properly time the timer-flips and discuss your plans, then coordinating feels really good. Two players can move a pawn twenty consecutive steps without pausing, and a locked-in third and fourth player can just chime in occasionally as one pawn goes a very far distance. There's a special sort of pleasure that can come from feeling like you're in "the zone," but it's amplified when it's shared with another player without talking.

Experience - Magic Maze might rank even higher with a re-rank, because before I started making this list, I hadn't played it in months. I played it at a meetup with both small and large groups and cleared and failed at levels repeatedly each sitting, four or more games a pop. It was a mix of smooth and hilarious but with occasional bad-feels when people (including me) couldn't figure out why we were being paged with the red stick.

Then, Barnes and Noble held a sale at the end of the year which dropped MM to $16. I've played the game around ten times since then with two through four, with players I trust more, and it feels like its potential was unlocked. The main couple I play with had tried it at a con before and hadn't liked it then - I suspect one or two bad players can tank it, which is a bit unfortunate, because those players will also not have a good time.

Even the worst part of the game design itself now seems like a feature instead of a bug. Magic Maze is visually noisy. Pretty, but noisy - it can be hard to distinguish where each player's weapon is, or where their exits are. Without players being allowed to talk, I'm now thinking that the five-to-ten-second lag it will take to discern where those sites are actually part of the difficulty that makes the game fun. (It is of course far more painful if the group sucks...)

Future - I've finally played with every rule laid out! Now it's just a matter of the special scenarios to fill out. Want to get gaming pal #1 more involved than she has been on this one; its franticness feels similar to Overcooked, which makes me think it has that potential. I get the feeling that introducing this to newer players should be pretty fun, as long as people aren't impatient and don't try to make the worst players feel bad.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness