A review of The Crystal Maze board game, from the perspective of someone who hasn’t actually played it yet.

Right, this arrived on Wednesday from WH Smiths (I know! In 2018!). Rollout is going to department stores first before going bigger. I’ve not had a chance to play it yet but don’t let that stop me from telling you about it.

Do you remember how the original board game from twenty years ago took years to set up, then you’d catapult a boulder under the settee and never get the industrial crane to work?

Well look at all this stuff.

That’s a lot of stuff. I’d suggest it’s actually not quite as imaginative as the first game but it’s a bit easier to set up.

The main board is double sided, with the maze element on one side and the dome on the other. Two teams play and it’s recommended you have a separate Mazemaster, although you can master for the other team if you want. The Mazemaster gets a lovely manual, detailing all of the games. There’s also a Timer App you can download, if you want something a bit fancier than the two minute egg timer provided.

Teams pick a zone and take it in turns to select one of the four challenges within. Each team also gets an ALIS card they can play on their opponents once if they think they will fail the challenge. The games range from quite small scale mental tests – word puzzles, riddles, circuits, to quite large scale physicals and mysteries (two of which involve some sort of treasure hunt around the entire and preferably different room, and involve some setting up with the contestants outside. Each of the mental games has between five and ten starting configurations for replayability.

For The Dome, a bunch of cards are placed face down spread across the board, you use the hands with the suckers to remove them from the table in the time earned. You may look under the card to determine its colour before it leaves the board at your own discretion.

And that’s it really. No idea how well it works in practice because I haven’t played it yet. In theory it seems quite nice though. We’ll do another review of it when we’ve actually managed to play it, as it is right now it’s not easy to find a copy of anyway.