Minotaurus is one of a new line of Lego games that's inspired by the myth of the Labyrinth of Crete. [Here's the boardgamegeek review for the record.]
As you'd expect, the board and all the pieces are made of Legos, although there's a lot more green pieces than you get in the average set. The assembly of the board is rather simple, they give you a stencil to lay on the base board. The scale is a bit small for standard lego micro-figs and instead tiny 1x1 pieces represent the heroes and the minotaur is a little model in his own right made from a dozen pieces.
The game play is fairly straightforward and has the goal of getting a microfigure to the center of the maze. Each turn you roll the dice. If you roll a 3-6, move one of your pieces that distance; if you roll grey, place or move a 2x1 grey wall to block an opponent or clear your path; if you roll black, move the minotaur eight squares and possibly send back an opponent's piece.
Rolling black or grey is possible because of one of the cooler pieces included in the set, a six sided Lego die. Each side has a 2x2 set of studs and there's flat pieces included that give various options for what to put on each side. One rule variant mentioned in the instructions is to replace the '3' side with a green piece and upon rolling green to allow one of your guys to jump over a hedge. The die itself has rubbery edges and is great fun to roll on a solid surface, if it can be bought separately I expect it might be popular with a wide range of gamers (assuming they also sell sides for "1" and '2" which aren't included in the game.
I've only played the game once so far and it was fairly fun and quick paced. It didn't feel especially deep but does seem like a reasonable party game if you've got a younger audience or a bunch of Lego fans. One modification I think I'll try out is to allow rolling twice each term with the condition that you can't move one of your microfigures twice. I think that would make it less likely that you'll have a turn that feels wasted and would also encourage having more microfigures in play at any given time.
Overall, I'd call this game a worthy start at exploiting the possibilities Legos offer board games. I think a next step might be to try out development oriented games like Catan where building up the map is a core part of game play. Alternately, there may be more interesting options for customizing the board, I'm now tempted to break out my copy of Master Labyrinth which has a maze made up primarily of shifting tiles. I like the way the instructions encouraged customization, I hope they'll collect some of the better variants somewhere.
Image from the Lego Store
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