Magic Maze Kids Review

boardgamequest.com:

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.

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.

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