Lost in Adventure: The Labyrinth

• Designer: Marco Pranzo
• Publisher: dv Games
• Players: 1-6
• Age: 10+
• Time: 120 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In the co-operative game Lost in Adventure, you and your fellow players will together explore an unknown world where your every action impacts how the story unfolds. You discover the game scenery as you go, placing cards side by side, talking to characters you meet, collecting clues, and using objects wisely. Your decisions will affect the adventure and lead you to one of the possible endings. Your goal is to fulfill all the prophecies and complete the adventure with as many favors as possible.

In Lost in Adventure: The Labyrinth, you take on the role of a legendary hero who is searching for the mythical minotaur at the heart of a labyrinth as well-known around the world as it is challenging to navigate. The game map reveals itself throughout the game, one scenario card at a time, as you progress in an adventure astride the edge of legend and reality.

Lost in Adventure is a cooperative game; all the players will play together to try to fulfill all the Prophecies and complete the Adventure with as many favors as possible.   The 10 Prophecy cards are placed face down on the table.  The Interaction, Item and Scenery decks are placed on the table, unshuffled.  Finally, the first Scenery card is placed in the center of the table and flipped over.  The Hero meeple is placed upon it.

Once the game starts, there aren’t really any turns.  The Hero can move across any Scenery cards that are on the table and can interact with Interaction cards in play.  You might add more Scenery cards to the tableau – there are little red arrows on the edges that will help you put the cards in the correct locations or you will be directed to cover certain cards.  

You can move orthogonally as you wish across the Scenery cards, and if you come across an undiscovered Scenery card (still face down), you flip it over as you come onto it for the first time – though you cannot go onto an undiscovered card unless there is a red arrow pointing to it.  

As you explore the map and interact with cards, you might find Items.  You will be told when you can pick up an Item – go thru the Item deck and get the corresponding card. It is now in your Inventory – there is no limit to the number of Items you can have.

When you discover a new Scenery card, go thru the Interaction deck and take out all the cards with the same number as the Scenery card – but DO NOT look at them yet. Lay them on the table.  Some cards may instruct you to flip them over immediately; if so, do this and resolve that card. 

The remaining Interaction cards are of two types.  Some do not require items, you interact with them when you choose to flip them over.  Some require items, and there is a neat system where you overlap the chosen Item card with the Interaction card to see whether or not you have chosen the correct Item. You’ll need to take your time when you use an item with an Interaction card because you’ll only get one change – generally the Interaction card is discarded once you try to use it.  

The game will tell you when you’ve reached the end – and then you will measure your success. Your final score is the number of Favors gained at the end of the story minus any unfulfilled Prophecies.  In general a score of 6 or better means you did quite well.

My thoughts on the game

This is an interesting variation on the adventure game genre – it is not a one-and-done sort of game; you can play this multiple times, trying to see all the puzzles and trying to maximize your score.  This reminds me a bit of the Cantaloop books from Lookout Games in that sense.  The designers have said online that this type of game is inspired by point and click graphic adventure games; and those were my favorite sort of adventure games once I graduated from the text walls of Infocom.

The gameplay is reminiscent of these graphic adventures as you check out your surroundings, find items to your inventory, and then try to make those items do things for you by holding them and clicking on stuff.  The one difference is that you can’t experiment freely with your items – there is still the limitation of Interaction cards only being used one time.  I learned halfway through my first game that if I had an interaction card and couldn’t find a reasonable item for it – that maybe I’d be better off waiting and seeing if I found an Item card later that made more sense…

The artwork in the game isn’t as breathtaking as Myst (well, what I thought of the art in Myst back when I only had VGA monitors) – but the art here is well done and very detailed.  The overall feel of the game is improved due to the quality of the art.  Also, be sure to look at things carefully as I think there are a number of clues that are interwoven within the illustrations…

There will be times where there only appears one thing to do – and if so, the Hero just pushes forward and encounters what the game has waiting for him.  Other times, there will be multiple choices, and the group should carefully discuss what they want to do.  Random wandering isn’t a great idea as there are plenty of negative things that can happen if you flip over cards that you’re not ready for!  

Lost In Adventure slowly tells a engrossing story, and it’s easy to be pulled into the adventure.  I was a bit surprised to see how much time had passed when the game was over.  Nothing is destroyed during play, and you can easily reset the game by putting all the decks back in order when you’re done.  While I don’t think that you can play the game an unlimited number of times, you could probably play two or three times if you wanted to explore the entire card set and try to maximize your score.  And then after that, you can pass the game onto a friend so that they can also experience it.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me…