Fail Safe Gamer

Is there anything more joyous than rolling a handful of custom dice? In Escape: The Curse of the Temple, each roll sees a colourful cacophony of symbols flash before you as you eagerly wait to decipher the result.

Then, “Oh no!” you’ll think as all of your dice inexplicably turn up black masks. You need help, you need to scream for help, but you’re cursed so instead, you wave frantically at your friends. They finally notice but *BONG* the gong sounds and they have to make a split second decision; do they help you or make for the start tile and save themselves?

Almost every second of Escape goes like this; it is perhaps the most stressful game I have ever played. Set to a sound track, you and up to 4 others have 10 minutes to explore the temple, find the exit, activate gems and get out of there! Either everyone escapes or you all lose in typical co-op fashion. You roll dice, you match symbols and when the gong sounds, you sprint for the start tile or risk losing one of your precious dice.

There is nothing particularly complicated here, but being pitted against the clock creates a comradery and a real sense of the theme that other co-ops sometimes fail to achieve. There is less strategy involved in winning than other co-ops and the ‘alpha gamer’ problem is somewhat eliminated by the frenetic nature of the game, you simply don’t have time to dictate.

Playing Escape is wonderful; I highly recommend it although I don’t find myself itching to play again, enjoyable as it is. The components are nice without being show stopping and the mechanics are well implemented, though with the clattering and shouting that goes on, the sound track is sometimes hard to follow. I often play Escape as a penultimate game on a games night – it’s too stressful to finish up with but short enough to slot in. Win or lose, you’ll have fun for 10 minutes and then pack it away.

Setting up Ankh Morpork floods a table with colour and character. The wooden components are tactile and vibrant and the artwork, which will be familiar to those who have read any Discworld novels, often leads to players ignoring the game and gleefully examining their hand of cards. It makes a great first impression.

This is further strengthened by the simplicity of gameplay. On your turn you play a card and do the actions it provides. These actions allow you to manipulate pieces on the board and steer the conditions towards your secret objective, or away from your opponents’. Perhaps you are trying to control a certain number of areas, or have minions all over the board or maybe you just want money or to cause trouble. You can’t know for sure what your opponents are doing but you are always aware of the ways they might win.

To succeed in Ankh Morpork, you have to be observant and devious, hiding your plans for as long as possible while picking apart the manoeuvres of your opponents. The multi-layered nature of the tactics required, coupled with how easy it is to play the game made it an excellent starter for my gaming group and, as such, it’s still a firm favourite.

The game does, however, become a little frustrating over time. Firstly, one of the secret objectives is much easier to complete than the others, to the point where we have removed it from our games. The ‘Commander Vimes’ objective requires only that the deck runs out (the game ends) with no one else winning. There is no direct way to combat this (you can’t return cards to the deck) and so a player in possession of this objective does not need to hide very well and can spend the game blocking everyone else. After several plays, you will also become very familiar with the other objectives, making it increasingly difficult to meet your goals as everyone else will shut down anything that could lead to a victory, whether that was your actual aim or not. Most of our games now end with the winner decided on points gained from money and pieces on the board rather than a completed objective.

I still enjoy Ankh Morpork and it continues to help me introduce my friends to gaming. My group’s over familiarity with the objectives does frustrate me sometimes as I come tantalisingly close to winning only to have it snatched from me simply because my friends habitually remove the minions of players who have too many pieces on the board. On the other hand, winning through your objective is all the sweeter nowadays. Ankh Morpork is a good looking game that is easy to play, easy to teach and fun despite its short comings.