Race to the Treasure

Tile laying games are a firm favourite in our house – so I was really pleased to find a copy of ‘Race to the Treasure’ in the bring and buy at UKGE, and upon getting home and now playing it several times am now even more pleased to discover how great a little game it is.

Race to the Treasure is a co-operative game from Peaceable Kingdom – a great publisher if you are looking for games for toddlers. The component quality and art is great as usual – and Peaceable Kingdom’s commitment to sustainability means that everything is made out of paper/ cardboard. Unfortunately, this has been less than ideal with a 2-year-old who wants to set the game up herself, as the paper bag that keeps most of the components in has now been ripped.

In the game, players are racing to make a path across to the opposite side of the board to reach the treasure before the ogre does. Along the way, you need to pick up 3 keys – there are 4 keys, so you have some choice in which 3 to go to, and there is also an ogre snack to delay the ogre by a turn. The set-up of the keys and ogre snack is random – determined by rolling 2 dice and placing them on the correct square in the grid. This has been really great for L practising some letter recognition (a curse of having a maths and science teacher for parents is that she is already starting to grasp the basics of addition, but can’t recognise any letters…).

On your turn, you draw a tile from the top of the stack. If it’s a path tile, you add it to the grid to continue the path you have already made; if it’s an ogre tile, it’s added to the ogre’s track down the side of the board. The path tiles need to connect to a path you’ve already made, but you are allowed to make dead ends – this provides enough flexibility that we found L is already able to place tiles correctly independently. The winner is whoever connects to the treasure first – the players via the path (and collecting 3 of the keys along the way), or the ogre along their straight path at the side of the board.

The difficulty level feels about right – I’d say so far we’ve won just over half of the time. You definitely need to think about where you place your path tiles in order to maximise the efficiency of your route – too many detours and the ogre will definitely beat you to the treasure. There is a decent amount of decision-making (for a toddler game…), and those decisions definitely matter. At first L needed some coaching about trying to make a good route, but the more we play the more she is able to place the path tiles independently.

My only real criticism of the game is that the imagery of the ogre could potentially be quite frightening. L is quite sensitive, and the first time we played this game, she cried whenever we drew an ogre tile. I’m pretty sure it was the ogre itself she was scared of as she would also get upset at the box art. Unfortunately, this meant that after that first time she refused to play the game for several weeks, but after a bit of exposure therapy to the ogre, she now plays it happily. I imagine this is less of an issue for the 5+ age rating on the box.

Other than that, this is a great little game that introduces the tile-laying genre nicely, and is one of the first games L has played that my husband and I actually enjoy playing with her.