Lost Temple

Gesellschaftsspiel

White Goblin Games, 2011

Autoren: Bruno Faidutti

Eckdaten: Deutsch, 25cm × 18cm × 5cm

Preis: 25€ → Amazon (PartnerNet)

ISBN:

• Citadels without town building
• Meaningful choices
• Good family / casual game
• Quite some downtime in between turns
• Good material

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Here is another strike of french game designer Bruno Faidutti, launched at SPIEL 2011. Lost Temple is a racing game in the spirit of his acclaimed game Citadels. Here comes the review.

Conclusion

Lost Temple is a lightweight racing game with a jungle adventurer theme. The mechanics rely on predicting other players' behavior and optimizing one's own advancement with some minor resource management. Its components are nicely done and the rules are easy to grasp. It's not likely to appeal to hardcore gamers, but a good game for casual gamers or as a family game. If you know "Citadels", this one will be familiar to you.

Materials

Lost Temple comes in a box of odd size (none of my other games has this form factor), but I like the box. Illustrations are very nice and remind of a certain fictional WWII archeologist. Many games, nowadays, have a main game and a minor puzzle game to fit all the components into the box. Not this one, which instead provides us with a patience game until the lid slowly slides off the box.

The contents are very well mad. There are 8 colored pawns, along with 8 player cards. Unfortunately, their color does not represent the pawn's color very well. That is no detriment to the game, but still these card's only purpose …

The character cards are nicely drawn and provided in four languages (German, French, Dutch and English), as is the rules book. Besides that, there are a couple of plastic gems (this game's money) and some cardboard chits representing chance tokens and machetes.

Of course, there is the nicely drawn board, which could have received a few more details here and there, but fits the cheery, cartoony mood really well.

All of the components feel really good and seem to be rather durable.

Game

The game has a simple premise: A few archeologists are hunting after a lost temple (hence the name). To cross the jungle and find it, they need the help of the natives. Whoever uses their help best and gets there first, wins.

To begin, there is a lottery, which player starts on which starting field and receives how many gems (or even a machete). They have tried to balance it, but in the end it's hard to tell if they succeeded. It did not feel unfair to my players so far.

From then on, the game proceeds in rounds. Every round consists of basically two phases:

1. Every player chooses a native to help them
2. All actions are performed in the natives' order

If you have played "Citadels" ("Ohne Furcht und Adel" in German), this will sound familiar to you (and rightfully so).

The natives are nine cards which each provide different possibilities to act. Examples are: "switch places with another character", "advance to the next village", "spend X gems to advance X fields".

All cards are shuffled each round and depending on the number of players, a few of the are randomly set aside. The starting player (usually the last in the race) goes first, secretly picking a native and handing the rest to the left. The next player does the same until everybody has one card; the rest are discarded.

In the second part of the round, the starting player calls each native in turn. If a player has him, he reveals his card, takes a gem and performs his action (if he can and wants to). This advances the players' pawns on the field and gets them to the temple eventually.

There are some peculiarities in the terrain. First, there are villages and shrines. These are relevant only as waypoints for the respective natives. Then, there are dense jungle fields. These can be crossed by paying a machete, otherwise the pawn has to stop his movement there and proceed normally on the next turn. Lastly, there are chance tokens which, upon stepping on them, will help or punish the pawn with movement, gems, machetes or being the next starting player.

The fun part in this game is actually the picking of the character. All powers are different and to play best you need to take the other players' decisions into account as well as guess which cards are already gone and if a chance token might help you. After picking the character – which might take some time, especially for people with analysis paralysis – the rest is relatively straightforward.

There are mechanisms, that prevent the field of players from spreading too far apart (which is good and makes the game interesting also for players of very different skill levels). This, in conjunction with the random elements of the game, makes this one a nice casual or family game. For strategizers and hardcore gamers, this one might not be a good choice. But for the occasional jungle race, the mechanics are just right with their simplicity and interactivity.

This 4-lingual review copy of Lost Temple is in parts courtesy of White Golbin Games.