Luxor Preview

Luxor is a game from Queen Games and designer Rüdiger Dorn. It has recently shot up the lists of most anticipated games because it was nominated for the Spiel des Jahres award, alongside Azul and The Mind.

In Luxor, each player takes a team of adventurers through the legendary temple at Luxor. Ultimately you are in a race to the tomb at the centre, but along the way there is also an opportunity to pick up many treasures.

The Gameplay

We were lucky enough to try the German language edition of Luxor recently at the UK Games Expo, so here’s a little more about how it plays.

The basic principle of Luxor is to play a card and move an adventurer, which means it’s a game you can teach to almost anyone with very little experience of board games. What’s interesting is that you have a hand of five cards and can only play the two on either end – this means that as you become more familiar with the game you might plan a few turns ahead and try to work your way through your hand to create a chain of good moves.

When you finish your movement you might land on a treasure, which are collected for a standard set collection style scoring, or you might get the opportunity to grab more special movement cards into your hand, or shoot forward a few spaces. Better treasure tiles require you to have more than one adventurer on the tile before you can claim it, so careful planning is essential.

The overall game is a balance between moving quickly and activating more adventurers, as well as being first to the tomb for the highest value treasures. However you could also move slowly and carefully collect sets of treasures and perhaps with the game. It’s great that the game has simple mechanisms, but it also seems like it will reward repeated plays as you try and optimise the speed with which you approach it.

Luxor - Coming Soon

Luxor has stiff competition for the Spiel des Jahres award. My money is probably on Azul, but abstract games very rarely win, so perhaps Luxor has a chance. Either way, even just the nomination is likely to mean that Luxor is a really popular game when it has a wide release in the UK.

If you’re looking for an introductory family game that comes with a gaming seal of approval, and should provide interest for younger and older gamers alike, then Luxor is definitely worth checking out.