Newly arrived – in early 2021.
If these little mammals (rats) give you a bit of a ‘funny feeling’, this perhaps isn’t your game. 🙂
If you love ’em, you may end up hating them when they catch you in their tunnels a few times!
There are no rats of course – just some tiny icons – calm down! You can cut up some lovely little tiles (provided) to make ‘stand up’ markers, or use a pile of about two dozen little dried beans – or little woodblocks, or buttons. Anyway, you can play in perfect peace, with never a rat in sight.
The idea of the game is that the solo searcher places small square tiles down (about 60 all told), which help them make their way around a maze of sewer tunnels, seeking out five artefacts that were lost long ago. As if working your way around a maze where there are occasional dead ends wasn’t enough, a couple of extra hazards are thrown in.
King hazard is our furry friend, of course. The venturer must on no account ever share a stepping stone with a rat, otherwise they’re done for: finito. Things are made more difficult by the fact that some sections of the sewer have been totally deprived of light, and cannot be navigated in the darkness.
But, oh, sweet relief! 😺 No, not a cat!
The game’s been designed to bring a bit of help from time to time, as well as hazard. There are a couple of bottles of rat poison that the sewer searcher may come across, and three torches. An over attentive ratty can be despatched with the poison, and the torches will see you through a short section of pitch blackness. But the help’s in limited supply.
If the venturer is able to get back to their starting point alive, bringing an artefact or two with them, they’ve done splendidly: five might be a miracle. Just deciding which one of up to four possible sewer-entrances you want to take at the very start, as both your entrance and exit point, can bring on the perspiration and body heat (tiles you don’t use can be shuffled back into the pack).
Things don’t get any cooler once inside the sewer, as the venturer’s confronted, by oh dear!!!
and by ever present decisions about which path to take, how on earth to outwit the rats that lurk all over the lair, how to find the lamps, poison, and artefacts, and how to get back.
The adventurer is allowed to move back and forth through unimpeded pathways as they wish, so they may be able to work out a strategy for getting back to the starting tile: escaping with gathered goodies through the manhole.
Winning – how’s it done?
It’s easy enough – just get back to the point where you started at the manhole cover alive: what more do you want?
You want artefacts too? Well, bringing any at all out of the sewers is quite something: how many will you get out?
- you have to make realistic decisions at every new section of sewer
- it doesn’t take long to get your head around it
- though it may take longer to decide what to do next
- luck is involved … as in all solo games
- replayable … some may become addicted 🙂
â–º Can you be lured into the lair?