I got an invitation to a game session organized by LEGO and their Finnish marketing firm. Playing with LEGO’s was part of my childhood as so many other young Finn growing in the 1980ies. Interesting fact is that LEGO is still going strong and now they have also come to the board game market with their cool designs.
Me and my 6 year old companion Daniel got to the game day half an hour late. Fortunately that only meant that the other participants were in mids of their games and there was satisfied little gamers all over the venue. After the initial shock, we sat down and began working through the rules and building instructions of the first game of the day, Lava Dragon.
Daniel build the game with some help from me and I have to say that the game looked really great. The only problem I could come up with was the fact that it’s very hard to keep the game apart from all other LEGO pieces and with even one missing part it is much harder to build the game. With small kids it might be a too demanding task for any parent.
The game itself was not very innovative; players rolled a dice and moved towards the top of the tower where the dragon was waiting for them. I’ve seen a several games like this and it did not have a huge impact on me. Daniel liked it better but it was not the game he had heard from the TV thus decreasing the appeal of the game to him. But as said, not a bad option if you need a cool, fast and relatively inexpensive game for children.
After Lava Dragon it was Daniel’s turn to pick a game and he choose Minotaurus which he had seen in the adds beforehand. I had also been waiting to get my hands on the game since it was a finalist in the Children Game of the Year award in Finland this year.
Again components didn’t leave much to criticize and while the copy we played had already been build we began the game immediately. And again the game itself wasn’t too huge of a surprise but it was a combination of elements from other older children games. The aim of the game is to get your LEGO guys to the center of the board by rolling the dice. The twist is that one side of the die lets you move the Minotaurus and eat other players pieces and one side of the die lets you to move the movable walls to block the movement of other players or the minotaurus. That’s it in general.
Minotaurus had some thought in it and Daniel was probably few years too young to understand the game thoroughly. I let him cheat a bit to even the game out and it was pretty close call between me and him (but I had to claim the win after loosing the Lava Dragon). Game lasted quite long even with two players and I suppose it’s going to last even longer when you add players and this is the biggest problem in the game. Children will probably get bored in the long run if they can’t keep up the pace even with the superb components. Or then they come up with their own rules to change the game into something more interesting which actually was also encouraged in the rules of the game.
We had fun and it’s awesome to see LEGO in the board game business. I trust that they will produce more games and I hope that they’ll find designers who take more risks in developing the games into more unique products.