Many Short Games: Part the Fifth: Real timed games

Welcome to Many Short Games: Part the Fifth: Real timed games. There are only two games of this type in the Games Library; games in which you have X minutes to accomplish a goal rather than playing to an endgame criteria.

Escape: The Curse of the Temple (Queen Games): In this game players have 10 minutes to explore the temple, find the exit and get out. Every player starts on the beginning tile and when everyone is ready, the 10 minute timer is started. Players simultaneously explore the temple by rolling their dice and building the temple as they explore; moving from room to room by rolling 2 green explorer die faces.  Each room may have certain criteria players need to enter it – maybe you need to roll 4 torches, maybe a couple of keys so dice are rolling constantly as everyone explores. Somewhere in the last few tiles is the exit chamber so exploring as fast and as wide as you can is a strategy. However, twice during the 10 minutes, everyone needs to make it back to the start chamber or they lose one of their dice (the game comes with a soundtrack that has auditory clues on when you need to get back to the start tile, but they are hard to hear in any setting that isn’t generally quiet.  Purchasing a 10 minute timer, a 3 minute timer and a 30 second timer might be something to consider). In order to leave the temple, each player has to roll as many keys as there are gems left in the gem pool, so if you haven’t done any of the room challenges where you get to offload gems from the pool to the temple, there’s no way you can leave. Add to that the black curse faces of the dice, which lock up that die until you can roll a gold un-curse face, and now its a good idea to travel with a temple exploring buddy (you would not believe how fast you can roll all 5 curse faces and then just sit there in a room hoping someone comes rescues you). There’s a lot going on with this game but it’s really fun and chaotic and someday I hope to actually escape the temple. (True story; the first time I played this game with a couple of friends and an acquaintance who hated cooperative games but hated not being part of the proceedings a little more, we failed epically. Half of us were stranded with all curse dice and only a third of the temple was explored when the time ran out. When I went back to procure the game for the Games Library, the Queen Games rep who had been showing us the game said that we were the worst team of players he had ever seen play the game.  He was not wrong; if you aren’t a person who can set aside your competitive attitude, this is probably not the game for you.)

Fuse (Renegade Game Studios): This game also is played in 10 minutes but in Fuse, you have that amount of time to diffuse X number of “bombs” or everyone dies horribly in a brilliant conflagration. Each player has 2 bomb cards in front of them that they need to diffuse by placing dice on the cards according to the instructions on the card. One person is in charge of drawing dice randomly from the bag and everyone decides how those dice are best used on any of the players’ bomb cards..  If you manage to complete a bomb card’s criteria, place it in the “diffused bombs” pile and grab a fresh bomb card from the middle. Dice are placed, cards are resolved and the dice bag is passed to the next person. Occasionally throughout play, Fuse cards are drawn, at which point players need to give up dice on their bomb cards to resolve the Fuse cards. If everyone is able to “diffuse” X number of bombs, hurray! No boom today. If not…