You may be familiar with the late 19th century fantasy story “The Princess and the Goblin,” about a princess who lives near a great group of gladiatorial goblins, hidden in mountain mines located near the princess’s castle (you may have even caught the Fractured Fairy Tale version of it on a Saturday morning in your childhood). Today, Bellwether Games hopes to bring the story to your game table.
The tile-flipping memory game for 1-4 players launches today as a Kickstarter project that will run for the next three weeks. In the game, players take turns flipping tiles and then placing them facedown on the table. You have the opportunity to peek at adjacent tiles and you try to memorize certain details of the faces. Each tile has a pathway marked by different symbols at its entry and exit. The goal is to make a path from the goblin kingdom back to the princess’s castle. To aid in your memories, each player has four different tokens to serve as breadcrumbs.
When a player can set an escape, they begin flipping tiles to (hopefully) create a path where one tile’s exit marker matches the entry marker on the subsequent tile. Match them all up, leading to the castle and a countdown timer begins. Other players have the opportunity to try to complete their paths before the mountain exits are sealed forever. (Or at least, the next time you play.) Flipping tiles with goblins on them can end your turn or can be used to pre-emptively shut down an opponent. When all players have finished their paths or the timer runs out, points are tallied, including breadcrumbs and tiles with certain icons on them.
I played the game at Geekway to the West this past weekend and enjoyed it. It’s a quick playing game that is perfect for families with children aged about seven and older. Kids will love the goblins, feel heroic in helping the princess find her way home, and will quite possibly do a better job of remembering where tiles are located than you.
Bellwether Games has created a number of other games and this game is scheduled to deliver in January, after it finishes its Kickstarter run in mid-June. Go check it out.
