Game Review

Concept:

Players are in search of treasure -- one wants rubies, the other wants gold. Capture the most treasure possible from your opponent without exposing too much of your own.

Gameplay:

Each player is given a set of templates that are covered with the treasure that his/her opponent wants to capture. Each template has strategically placed holes used to capture treasure.

To start, each player chooses a template. The templates are placed on opposite sides of the game box. Next, players place a new template over their opponent's template. Players receive one point for each of their opponent's treasure that can be seen through the holes of his/her own template. This repeats until all templates have been played.

Winning Conditions:

• The winner is the player with the most points (treasure) after all of the templates are played.

Our Opinion:

This game is well presented, simple to learn, and well balanced. The Zombies found that placing the templates well was actually quite challenging, however, the scoring mechanism provided was confusing.

Scoring is represented by moving pegs on the edges of the game board. There are two pegs per player, one that represents the "tens" place of the score (10,20,30,etc.) and the other is the "units" place (0-9). This seems nice initially, but actually annoys the player when the simple addition causes both pegs to be moved. (The Zombies who played this game are all computer professionals and are mathematically inclined -- you'd hope we could perform siple addition easily!) Each of us noted that the peg movement confused the scoring just enough to make the game less fun.

Gameplay worked best when the players were required to place their template at the same time -- usually one player tended to race ahead and the slower player could take advantage of knowing their opponents next move.

The Zombies also noted that the game is probably most enjoyable for a pair of 7 - 10 year old kids, but the game just didn't have enough "cool" elements to expect kids to play it more than twice.

I recommend not buying this game unless you have kids between 7 - 10 years old and you find this game on sale.

Where to buy:

Any local game or hobby store and "Education oriented" toy stores.