While searching for the exit, the players will discover new chambers - but they'll need the right combination of adventurer, key and torch icons to enter and explore these chambers. To activate gems, different rooms have different requirements. Once these are met, you can take the gems from the depot and place them in the room you activated them from. As if the game isn’t enough fun already they throw in a full expansion that allows for a lot of replay and defiantly makes the game more interesting for more experienced gamers or people that just know how to work well together. I will do a full review of the expansion later. Example: Frank uses two adventurer icons and connects the stair- way entrance of the top chamber from the draw pile to one of the entrances of his current chamber. 3. Activate magic gems Casual Gamers: Most of my friends would be considered casual gamers, they have only tried a handful of games but do enjoy trying and learning new ones and I can tell you they loved this one. I had them intrigued right from my words “try this game there are no turns and we work as a team”. There is a lot of table talk in this game I think more then I have seen in any other game even other cooperative games. The game lasts only 10 minutes (maybe 15 if you include setup) so if time is an issue for you it won’t be with this game. You win or lose as a team and either way your group will want to play again and because the game has some elements from more complicated games (tile placement, specialty dice, and cooperative game play) it can work as a bridge to other games, perhaps dungeon crawlers and other team games.

With the expansion within the basic game it’s possible to add helpful treasures (yay … easier) and nasty curses (grrrr .. harder) to change the gameplay a little and in my opinion … make the game a lot harder. After two rounds you have a final chance to get to the exit of the temple, which has hopefully been revealed by then. Once you are at the exit you need to roll enough keys to match the number of gems remaining to be found. A green adventurer, which appears twice on the die – you need these to move from room to room, and to activate some gems. For the Curses module, every time you discover a chamber with a purple mask on it, you immediately draw a curse card. A curse can be broken by rolling the icons shown at the bottom, but you can continue playing without breaking the curse ... if you dare. The curses (from left to right) are: Players must reach this decision unanimously! A turn of fate can be provoked only twice during the course of the game.Example: Frank has rolled 4 torch icons and activates the magic gem inside his current chamber. He removes one gem from the depot and places it inside the chamber. There are five fedora-wearing wooden meeples, which aren’t the weightiest but are perfectly adequate for the job, as well as five coloured cardboard player tokens (so you don’t forget which meeple is yours.) Escape: The Curse of the Temple is a fantastic dice exploration game (or diceploration, if you want to go there). Its mechanics are well designed and laid out in an easy-to-understand way, which makes this an excellent family board game. You like the Indiana Jones movies and how he always escapes the temples, tunnels and traps just in the last second? Here is just the game for you. The temple around you is collapsing and you have 10 minutes to find the exit … so now … ESCAPE!

A new chamber from the draw pile must be placed next to an entrance on a face-up tile. Die icons with a red frame Place the gem depot to the side with gems on it; the number of gems depends on the number of players. Also, place two gems next to the depot. Start the CD (or the sand timer) and you're ready to escape! Magic Maze takes the top spot on the list of board games like Escape: The Curse of the Temple because it is another fantastic real-time title where everyone needs to make it out of a situation alive. Here you are silently cooperating with others to rob a labyrinthine shopping mall before time runs out. Escape: The Curse of the Temple is a cooperative game in which players must escape from a temple which is cursed before the temple collapses and kills one or more explorers, thereby causing everyone to lose.While not as desirable as the Ark of the Covenant, Holy Grail, or Crystal Skull, Escape: The Curse of the Temple’s components are nonetheless excellent quality. First I’m going to say: buy this game. Buy it, because there’s nothing like it in your board game library and you WILL find this fun, trust me. Simply grab the chamber tiles, remove the starting chamber, exit chamber and gem depot and then shuffle the rest to create a draw pile. Then take the top two chamber tiles from that pile and place them either side of the starting chamber, with the stairway entrance graphic on those tiles aligned with the door graphics on the starting chamber. Next, grab the top four chamber tiles from the draw pile and shuffle them together with the exit tile. Place these five tiles at the bottom of the draw pile. These late additions, found only by the most persistent forum diggers, were nonetheless welcomed by the fans. But they didn't fix everything. So starts the introduction to the rulebook. It’s a good two sentence overview of the game, but it doesn’t really answer what’s so bad about the curse, how your team found themselves in the temple, where you learned what to do when you hear a gong, or how 5 dice ended up in your hand. None of this really matters at the moment, you’ve just heard a disembodied voice implore you to ESCAPE, and you feel certain your team better do so within 10 minutes, or else!