Karak Labyrinth

Today we are going to be looking at Karak Labyrinth from Albi. Over the last few years, Karak has become a popular and well-regarded family-friendly dungeon crawler (mental note must review Karak II), and Karak Labyrinth is a spin-off game focused around drawing a maze and navigating a dungeon as quickly as possible.

The game is very similar to the Dungeon Scrawlers games, but with a few key differences in terms of how navigating around the dungeon works.

In Karak Labyrinth, you’re trying to escape the collapsing dungeon before everyone else. You have your own labyrinth sheet and marker, and the game begins by revealing an Objective card that tells you what will score points and, in many cases, which staircase you must start from. Once you begin drawing your route through the maze, you cannot revisit spaces, cross your own path, or move diagonally. This is the first key thing that affects how you move through the dungeon, as creating an optimal path is really important. Often, you get halfway through, because you have very little time, and suddenly realise that you’ve messed up. You can erase mistakes, but only back to the last symbol you visited, which is often needed.

As you move around, you’ll come across various symbols that can help or hinder your progress. Traps cause you to lose one of your three hearts, and visiting rats or skeletons without having the correct equipment to fight them will also do the same. To defeat rats, you’ll first need to obtain a sword, while skeletons require a bow. Gaining these items involves immediately completing the corresponding minigame on the back of the item before circling the item on your sheet to show you’ve collected it. Keys are earned in the same way and are needed before you can claim treasures.

You are doing all of this under time pressure, as you want to be the first one out, which makes the minigames, which on the face of it aren’t too tricky, pretty stressful. This is definitely not a game for those who like to take their time and consider every move, and often your biggest enemy is making mistakes due to rushing. The minigames are the same each time, as you have your own copy of each one. One criticism and improvement, in my opinion, would have been to have decks of these minigames so that each time you do one it’s slightly different. Equally, though, you could argue that gaining experience and practice as you go, in real life, is all part of the dungeon crawler experience.

The exits from the labyrinth are guarded by bosses, represented by the Minotaur, Spider and Troll. Reaching one of these spaces isn’t enough on its own. To escape through that exit, you must solve that boss’s minigame before continuing. If at any point you lose all three of your hearts, or trap yourself with no legal moves remaining, you’re eliminated and score no points.

The first person to successfully escape takes the Fastest Player token and flips the sand timer. Everyone else then has just thirty seconds to make it out of the labyrinth themselves. Once time is up, only those who escaped successfully and still have hearts remaining can score. Working through the Objective card from top to bottom, you score points for the various conditions shown, such as treasures collected, monsters defeated, gems visited, or particular exits used. Whoever finishes with the most points is the winner.

The game itself is over very quickly, but when we played, we ended up playing a number of sessions as a campaign, or simply played first to a certain number of points overall.

All of the pieces are chunky, and everything is well presented and works well. As usual, I would have preferred a better insert. The treasure box can’t sit flat anywhere in the insert, which is a bit annoying, but to be fair, this will not bother most people. The artwork is great, and everything is really easy to follow, with no written information, so it’s totally language-independent and also very suitable for younger kids.

While I still personally prefer Dungeon Scrawlers, I think Karak Labyrinth is the better game for younger children. While it’s fast-paced, the fact that the really stressful part only starts when someone escapes allows you to have a slightly slower-paced game if you wish, and things like that can obviously be easily house-ruled.

Overall, Karak Labyrinth is a fun and accessible speed dungeon crawler that I think will appeal to a lot of young board gamers.

Disclaimer: A copy of Karak Labyrinth was kindly gifted to us by Albi. We have not been paid for this review, and all of our thoughts and opinions are our own.