Favorite Board Game for December 2nd

#23 Luxor

In Luxor you guide a team of archaeological experts through a forgotten temple to catalog lost treasures. This is a simple "roll and move" style game, but you are not actually rolling dice. You are playing cards from your hand, and ... oh, yes. There's a twist.

You always have five cards in hand. You cannot rearrange or organize the cards in your hand. You must keep them in the order that they are dealt to you. When it comes time to play a card, you must play one of the cards on the "outside" of the spread, either the first or the fifth cards only. Then (with four cards remaining) when you draw a card to end your turn, you must insert that card into the center of your spread, between cards 1-2 and 3-4.

It may sound tricky, but it's actually really simple and intuitive. Choosing when to play from the left side of your spread and when to play from the right side of your spread creates an interesting puzzle. The game board itself is a spiral filled with tiles with the temple's master chamber at the center.

Playing a card moves one of your explorers a certain number of spaces. Landing on tiles may allow you to claim the tile, but many require you to have more than one of your explorers there at the same time. Figuring out when to move which explorers to claim the best treasures is key to winning the game.

This is a great game to play with folks who are more comfortable with those "roll to move around the board and get rich" kinds of games like Monopoly. But, Luxor has so much more going on. As tiles are claimed, those spaces are removed so playing pieces coming through later just skip over them. This keeps the board tight and makes the game really fast.

Because players control multiple pieces, there's always a few options on your turn. You choose which card to play and which piece to move. You aren't a slave to the roll of the dice. Luxor is an awesome game, and it's by the same designer as another one of my favorite games: Karuba (#33 in my ranking of favorites, if you're interested.)

It has just occurred to me that Karuba and Luxor have complementary themes. In Karuba players are adventurers hacking their way through a jungle searching for a lost temple. It might be cool to play Karuba and Luxor back to back one night. First to find the temple, and then explore it!