Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a faithfully well-produced piece of nostalgia for fans of the movie that provides a below-average board game experience. The molded miniatures are clearly the showpiece, but the other game components are also of good quality, with sturdy cardboard tokens, textured cards, and colorful dice sized d4 through d20. Nearly all of the game cards have scenes from the movie, and in some cases you even benefit from quoting a scene. The only flimsy-ish part is the black-velvety box insert, which is meant to be lifted out to store the folded board underneath. Remove and replace with care. Fantastic presentation. The game starts at the scene where Sarah has gotten lost in the labyrinth and falls into the Oubliette. Hoggle, Didymus and Ludo each start at the other three corners of the board. From here, it's a bit like a cooperative version of Talisman, where everyone is moving around an outer circle taking on challenges, until a card flips that allows access to the inner board (Goblin City), and finally to Jareth himself. All players in a shared space get to roll dice for skill tests and keep the highest result, or if it fails, any player in a shared space can discard a willpower token and roll the mighty d20. Essentially, players spend most of the game trying to get into a shared space, and have enough combined willpower to be able to defeat the goblins when the gate opens. This all requires some light strategy, with some risk and a little luck. Note that if you have fewer than 4 players, all 4 characters are still on the board taking actions, so someone will be playing as 2 of them. A 5th player can play against the group as Jareth by drawing 2 event cards on everyone's turn and choosing the ones the players will face. It's best with exactly 4 players, which will limit the appeal for some people. The endgame is the real downer here. I realize that thematically, Sarah has to ultimately face the Goblin King alone, but the way this mechanically plays out leaves winning or losing the game up to a die roll, and the other players can only watch. It parallels the climax of the movie, but it is terrible game design to have everyone strategically cooperating for an hour, only to make it to an ending where one player alone wins or loses for the entire group based on nothing but luck. At the end, everyone NOT playing as Sarah was just sort of like, "Oh, really? So how can we help you? We can't? Um...that's weird, but okay, go for it I guess." Normally I would prefer to play a board game with 3 or 4 friends instead of watch a movie, but in this case I'd rather just watch Labyrinth.