The 2017 Spiel des Jahres nominees brought us three amazing titles: Kingdomino, Magic Maze, and The Quest for El Dorado. While Kingdomino ultimately won the award, I would have given it to The Quest for El Dorado. Regardless, all three games were pretty fantastic in their own right. It wasn’t until a while later that I finally got to try Magic Maze, and I really enjoyed that real-time game.
The newest offering in the Magic Maze Lineup is Magic Maze Kids. It seeks to distill the essence of Magic Maze down to a game that can be enjoyed by kids as young as 5 years old.
Gameplay Overview:
If you’ve played the original Magic Maze, a lot will be familiar here. There are 4 heroes in the game and the players share control of all of them. The trick is that each player has a directional arrow and they can only move characters in the direction their arrow is pointing.
For example, if you need to move the Knight character to the flower icon, you may need to move it up the path, wait for someone else to move it to the right, before you move it up again, and finally have a 3rd person move it to the left onto the icon.
That’s the basic concept of the game. You are trying to navigate the pawns through a series of paths and obstacles, but you can only move them in one cardinal direction. The game is played in real time and you must work together with your fellow players to accomplish all of the quests and save the king.
Game Experience:
One of the reasons we tend not to give out review scores for kids/family games is that the play experience is highly dependent on the age and abilities of your child. What may be an excellent game for a 6 year old, might be way too easy for a 8 year old. Then again, my friend has a 6 year old that can play Agricola, while my other friends’ 6 year old is still playing memory-type games that require minimal reading.
I say this because my experience with Magic Maze Kids may be vastly different from yours. I’ve introduced my kids to a ton of diverse games (thanks to needing young minions to help me review them), including My Lil’ Everdell, Catan Junior, Dorf Romantik, and Necromolds. So they have a fairly solid base of gameplay and strategy. Yet Magic Maze Kids ended up being an exercise in frustration for me.
One thing they had a hard time grasping was that there were no turns. You just move a pawn when it needs to be moved. That led to two things happening: Either I had to “suggest” one of them move a pawn where it needed to go, or I had to wait not-so-patiently while they spaced out or started playing with the punchboard tokens. Eventually, I’d have to tell them to focus or ask if there was anything they could be doing.
On the plus side, the rules were easy enough for them to grasp, and the game did an excellent job of stepping us into the rules over a series of 8 or so short tutorial games. By the time we got to the full game, they mostly had things understood. Yet despite that, there were times I wanted to throw the game out the window. It brought back memories of playing Cap’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy (not pleasant ones) which has a similar play experience. The problem is that my kids don’t like being told what to do. So if you suggest to my son that he should move the knight a certain way so we can finish the task, 50% of the time he will just decide not to do that. It’s almost like we are playing a hidden traitor game.
And then I thought: “Hey maybe they just need to work together without me directing them”. So I stepped out of the room to “make a call” and told them to play without me. Within 2 minutes, there was screaming, punching, and meltdowns. I had to come back in to save pieces from flying across the room. Magic Maze Kids requires extreme cooperation and when they weren’t getting that from each other, it led to fights.
The tricky part of Magic Maze Kids is figuring out who it’s for. The box says ages 5+, and while I do think 5 year olds can handle it, it’s not going to be super easy for them. But once you are past the tutorial games, there are only 2 boards to use that have the full game. For anyone in the 8+ range, you are better off just buying one of the existing Magic Maze games. You’ll get more bang for your buck and a lot more staying power.
Final Thoughts:
While Magic Maze Kids absolutely does what it sets out to do, it’s also straddling the line in a really awkward space. It probably has a 2-3 year age window for kids before they age out of it, but its limited supply of maps means it also is going to get repetitive fairly quickly. While I do concede my kids did have fun playing it, as a parent, I found it extremely frustrating to count on my young ones to actually play the game solidly enough that we weren’t spinning our wheels constantly. Perhaps I should just avoid cooperative games with them for the time being. Alas, Spirit Island will have to wait for another day…
