Library Labyrinth (2023)

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Build a team of amazing fictional and historical women to put escaped literary terrors back in their books! Can the Lady of Shalott defeat Dracula? Or Heidi and Ada Lovelace overcome a Kraken? Can Nzinga and Mary Seacole deal with the Martian Robots from War of the Worlds?

Library Labyrinth is a co-operative board game set in a cursed library that plays in about 45-60 minutes for 2-5 players and around 30 minutes as a solo game. The play space is a grid of 25 octagonal tiles that can rotate and flip, revealing (and changing) parts of the library. Some tiles spawn literary terrors, which players need to defeat by drafting different book cards from their hands. These book cards each feature a fictional or historical woman with a combination of six different skills. Team up different cards to defeat specific terrors, then travel through the library to place the terrors back on the correct shelves. The curse is still at work in the library, however, undoing your good work, so make sure that you don't run out of time or let the library become overwhelmed...

In more detail, on your turn you can pick up cards, trade cards, flip or rotate floor tiles, move down a lit path (as shown on the floor tiles), capture a terror, or put a terror back in the right shelf. You have three actions available with the option to donate one action to another player. After each player turn, a curse disturbance card is drawn, which disrupts the playing area by rotating a tile or spawning a new terror. When all six shelves have been filled with a captured terror, you win; if the deck of curse cards runs out or six terrors are left on the library floor before this happens, the game is lost.

Library Labyrinth is a quick game leading to ridiculous character mash-ups. Of course Alice in Wonderland and Marie Curie can deal with the Big Bad Wolf! The game can also scale between a game suitable for ten-year-olds and a fiendish puzzle. Floor tiles can be swapped out to make a harder grid, more difficult monsters can be used, or the amount of time can be reduced. Each game also comes with a booklet about the characters and the literary terrors in the game.