Temple Twist

• Designer: Bernhard Weber
• Publisher: Kosmos
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4ynidfk
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

A cryptic notebook leads your archaeological expedition deep in the jungle to an ancient temple rumored to hold incredible artifacts. Your goal: Explore the rooms of the temple and escape before your energy runs out! But that’s easier said than done because the temple is a maze of movable walls and mysterious mechanisms! Now it’s time to work together. Using your action cards, you’ll navigate through this unique structure, move walls, and even rotate the entire temple!

In the action-packed co-operative game Temple Twist, players take turns choosing an action card from their hand to strategically manipulate the three-dimensional temple and move the explorer cube through the maze of rooms. Play through a series of increasingly difficult expeditions, or pick up some challenge cards and dive right in. This game combines strategy, co-operation, spatial reasoning, and hands-on action with a first-of-its-kind 3D-maze-gameboard that changes as you play.

There are a number of different modes in Temple Twist. I’ll start with the Base Game and then move on from there.

To set the game up, you must first build the Temple (only once when you first open the box). The Temple is set on the table and the red explorer cube is placed in the room that has a door at the bottom.  Five moveable walls are placed in random slits in the temple.  Two room cards and one door card are placed face up on the table.  The 12 action cards are dealt out evenly amongst the players.

In order to win the base game, the team must explore all the rooms on the revealed cards and then escape the temple through the revealed door.  The explorer cube is never touched; it moves through the temple by rotating the temple and moving/removing walls.  The players cannot communicate the action cards that they have, but they are encouraged to talk about what strategy that they feel is best.

On a turn, the active player must play an action card from their hand

• Turn the temple once
• Turn the temple twice
• Turn the temple as many times as you like in the same direction
• Build/remove one wall
• Build/remove two walls
• Move one wall

You can also use the special tokens to communicate something about your cards or to try to swap a card with a teammate.

At the end of your turn, check to see if a revealed room has been explored – this is when the explorer cube is in said room at the end of a turn.  It has to be fully within the room, you can check by pushing a wall into the temple to see if the die moves.

Continue clockwise trying to visit the designated rooms and then ending up at the correct door.  The team wins if the explorer cube can get to the correct door while it is at the bottom of the temple (closest to the table).  The team loses if a player cannot play an action card OR if the temple is moved so violently that the explorer cube falls out of the temple or a wall falls out.  If you fail, the group can play the next round with two extra cards added to their deck.

Leave the cube in its current space and all the moveable walls in place.  Start the next round and keep going.

When you feel ready, you can also move into the EXPERIENCED MODE.

To play this next level, you can increase the number of rooms that need to be explored.  For each extra room, the group receives two additional action cards from the supply (there is a deck of 28 extra cards that you can possibly add to the base deck).  The team can also add in Challenge cards which each provide a new rule that must be obeyed.  There are 14 different Challenge cards and each provides an interesting restriction.  For each Challenge revealed, the team also gets two more extra Action cards. The team can modify the difficulty of their games by changing the number of Challenges and Room cards that they want to add.

Finally, the team can try EXPEDITION MODE.

This mode uses the Expedition deck instead of the Challenge cards. In each Expedition, an expedition card is revealed and this tells you how many rooms must be explored before getting to the exit door.  The team does not get any bonus cards if they have to explore more than 2 rooms.  The group also gets a new Activate Cube token to use.  Once per expedition, while the die is in a cloverleaf room, you can use the token to apply one of the two icons seen on the die while in that room (draw cards, change the exit rules, retrieve a played card).  You might also gain snack tokens which are additional one-time use abilities.  There are 20 expedition cards that you group can try to play through!

My thoughts on the game

Temple Twist is an interesting 3D puzzle that you can play with your gaming group – though I have enjoyed it maybe a bit more as a solo puzzle.  After learning the rules, we have pretty much only played the Expedition mode as the easier modes were not overly challenging.  The board is set up each round and then you find out the rules for the round on the Expedition card.    The way in which your group can gain extra actions via the snack tokens as well as from the activate cube action make the process of solving the puzzle of the round more manageable.

In the basic version, each player gets their share of 12 action cards, and the entire group gets to swap cards exactly once.  If you get a hand of all one type of card, it could be that you have nothing to do but take a meaningless action because of the limitations of your hand cards.  While there are more restrictions/rules in the advanced levels, the game also gives players more ways to solve the puzzle, and this is a much more satisfying way to play for me.

I do have a few small quibbles with the game.  While the 3D maze is a neat idea; it is frustrating to have to try to read the icons on the die when the holes in the maze don’t necessarily allow you to see the die! 

Also, as dice have a tendency to do, you end up playing the dice wherever it lands, not where it was theoretically supposed to go.  So, you might have a great logical plan set up, but then a weird bounce puts the die in an unexpected position – and your plan is now shot to pieces.

While each individual round can be won/lost by your group, the rules sort of tell you to just keep playing on and on.  There isn’t really a true endpoint if you look at it under those terms.  Or, as we have done, just consider each round a full game.  Or continue to increase the difficulty of the rounds until you cannot succeed and measure your score by how many rounds you were able to complete.

As such, this game plays out more like an activity than a game.  It is a fun way to challenge your brain to solve the changing puzzles in this 3D maze – by both rotating it as well as altering the walls within it.  Though the challenge and expedition cards make each round play out a little different, after a few sessions with the Temple, all the permutations feel pretty much the same, and as a result, I’m not sure when/if this one will make it back to the table with my current game group.   It feels fully explored by us after a few sessions.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor

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