Category: Two player

Yes, Minotaurus, not Minotaur. Minotaurus is a simple, quick LEGO game about teams of heroes and a minotaur that guards the Temple at the center of the board.

As could be expected with a LEGO game, first you have to build it. This phase is pretty straightforward: follow the building instructions. Once you’ve built the board, the game can begin.

Choose the color of your little LEGO people’s armor (apparently that’s how you distinguish nations in this game?). The youngest player goes first, rolling the special die, which you constructed along with the board. The original die has 3-6, gray and black. If you roll a number, you move one of your heroes that amount of spaces (one pip on the board is one space, and no diagonals). If you roll a gray, you move one of the gray walls to wherever you’d like on the board, so long as there is at least one path from every starter corner block to the center. If you roll the black side of the die, you get to move the Minotaur eight spaces, again in whichever direction you choose.

If the Minotaur catches a hero during any of those eight moves, the hero goes back to their starting block and the Minotaur goes back to the center. The goal of the game depends on how many players you have. The game rules state that if there are only two players, you have to get two of your heroes to the Temple, and if there are three or four players, you only have to get one to the Temple.

That said, the rules aren’t concrete. There’s another side to the die that can replace the number three, if you chose. It’s green, and when you roll it, you can choose to move one of the hedges. You can also change the goal. By changing the rules, you could theoretically play this game solo, but I think it’s more fun with other people.

And, to continue their extensive Fluxx franchise, Looney Labs brings us: Chemistry Fluxx! Perfect for chemistry students, teachers, and fanatics. Learn chemical symbols while stealing them from each other!

Most of the actions in Chemistry Fluxx are the same as traditional Fluxx, but some of the rules are different. My personal favorite is what I believe is called “Spontaneous Reaction.” It’s a free action rule stating that at the beginning of your turn, if you can name a chemical compound of any two or more of the keepers in front of you, you may draw a card. This cannot be a compound that you have already named. For instance, if you have Barium, Nitrogen and Oxygen, you could say, “Barium Nitrate” Ba(NO3)2 and draw a card. There’s also the Lab Coat Bonus. Whoever has the lab coat draws an extra card every turn.

The keepers are mostly elements, but sometimes equipment. I already mentioned the lab coat, and there are also test tubes, goggles, etc. Because the majority of the keepers are elements, most of the goals are about the elements. Goals are compounds like Carbon Dioxide, Water and Salt.

Speaking of goals, I have a question that perhaps one of you could answer for me: one of the goals is Laughing Gas, for which you need nitrogen and oxygen. But aren’t nitrogen and oxygen 99% of what we breath?

Superfight: aka the strangest argument you’ve ever been a party to! Where the group discussion isn’t what toppings should be on the pizza, but whether one hundred Genghis Khans with a battleship would be able to defeat a steel, fire-breathing dinosaur skeleton*.

In Superfight you are drawing three objects (mostly people), like MacGyver or Ghandi, and three descriptions, like “has a puppy gun” or “can remain invisible as long as they hold their breath”. You take the character of your choice as well as two descriptions, one of your preference and one random.

Everybody reveals their strange, deadly combinations, and then the argument commences! It’s best to play this game with somebody sitting on the side as the Judge, because otherwise you may never reach a consensus. The debate is about which one would be best able to defeat the others, and it can get pretty silly! For instance, my fire-breathing Hulk with a portal gun managed to defeat my mother’s acid-spitting, neurotoxin-emitting demon because I just summoned the Bifrost** or something similar and teleported her away!

On occasion, the card turns up where there are multiple interpretations thereof. For instance, my cousin insisted that his “can control all animals” card included humans, since we are animals, and when I played the character “Mr. Rogers”, I insisted that it was Mr. Steve Rogers, aka Captain America (played by Chris Evans in the MCU).

In the end, it’s not about who wins, but who can claim and defend the title of the craziest, silliest, most overpowered being in the history of Superfight***!

*Yes, this was a real scenario.

**Thor can handle an acid-spitting, neurotoxin-emitting demon, right?

***There is no documented record of the actual craziest, silliest, and most overpowered combination that has been drawn.

Yes, you read that right. Crazy Ates, not Crazy Eights. Most of you know the original, Crazy Eights, with the boring numbers, but Crazy Ates steps it up a level: each number has a food allocated to it!

Possibly my favorite is 10, the banana split. But what’s really fun is when you add the colors. You know how in Crazy Eights, there are colors as well as numbers to match? Hopefully, you know what I’m talking about. Anyways, something my cousins and I like to do is think of a food of that color and add it to the dish of that number. For example, a blue number 3 could be the blue cheese burger. Or a purple 9 could be an eggplant quiche. It adds just a little more flavor to the original play.

8 stands as the wild card, depicted by a steak with ice cream on top (please don’t ask). If you don’t have a matching number or color to the card in play as of your turn, you can play your favorite dead cow topped with dairy to get you out of drawing! The goal of the game is to be the first person without any cards left.

Both the Crazy Eights and Crazy Ates are simple and good for little kids while not being brain-numbingly boring for the adults. There’s still a level of strategy involved, even if it is pretty small.

This week I’d like to introduce a Kickstarter game called Robot Lab. I’ll give you one guess on what it’s about: yup, it’s about robots!

In Robot Lab, you each choose a color for the body of your robot. As you draw cards throughout the game, you have two goals: get a head, two arms and two legs of your robot’s color attached to your robot, and stop your opponent from reaching that goal.

You can do this by using your “attach” turn to attach a piece you don’t want onto their robot. For instance, if they’re building an orange robot, and you’re building blue, and they had no head, you could use your turn to attach a red head from your hand onto their robot.

This game could theoretically be adapted to be cooperative or single-player, but I think that would take a lot of the fun out of it. One of the best parts is that it takes the Munchkin aspect of stabbing your friend in the back to simplest form. No fancy, triple-card moves, just a wrong colored arm and a turn to spare.