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The flickering candlelight casts shadows across the mini pizzas we had just heated, and we dived headfirst into escaping this hellscape labyrinth. Armed with just a candle and a dodgy sense of direction ruined by the maps app on our phones, we hoped to escape The Nightcage.
Each turn you have to crawl around a labyrinth with nothing but your candle and the hope that you don't find a creature lurking. As two players we each had control of two people, both hoping that I had the smarts to help them escape the hellscape they were trapped in. Boy were they lucky my wife was sat there too. It goes like this. You have tiles that are lit up, by your candle, all around you. If it is more than one tile away, you can no longer see it and that tile disappears. Once you move onto a tile you light up any tiles you can now see and hope there isn't a monster on there. You are searching for a key and a gate to use it on. Every person needs a key, and the game can only be won if each person has a key and is on a gate. Notice that I said person not player there, meaning that as we were both playing two people, we both needed two keys, they cannot be swapped or traded meaning we each had to acquire them ourselves. The Nightcage is a cooperative game meaning if I found a key and already had one for each of my players I could choose to stay still and continuously light that tile up until one of my wife's people could get there at the cost of not exploring and locating a gate. We found ourselves constantly passing suggestions to each other and the feeling of relief and accomplishment when we did manage to win was very rewarding.
Nitty Gritty
So, the nitty gritty to this game isn't very large in all honesty. The tiles are in a very cool ‘candle’ tile holder and once the last is drawn if all people cannot make it to a gate with a key, its game over. There are several different types of corridors and monsters including ‘bosses’ that we haven't used yet. The corridors range from nice solid safe ones to ones where as soon as it is left it will crumble into a hole. The board wraps around, meaning that if you reach the end of one side you can wrap over to the other side Pac Man style. You also light tiles in a wraparound manner, meaning if you are at one edge and the path goes over it you will light a tile at the opposite side of the board or that a monster can also attack from a wraparound perspective.
When laying tiles, you ‘can see’ there are several different monsters that can be encountered, for the first game the rules recommend you use the first basic monster (Wax Eater). Even still it can cause issues. The monster attacks when it senses movement and will attack all directions simultaneously until it reaches a wall or a ‘hole’ so you could inadvertently cause another player to take a hit a when you move out of the way. Now this isn't the end of the world as there is no HP in this game however it will cause your precious candle to go out. When a player has no candle, they can no longer stand still and they only light up the room they are in, meaning that your options for movement become very limited and you have to just take the top tile and hope for the best. You can relight the candle by being in an adjacent tile to a player with a lit candle but if they are far away across the board you could be in trouble. It is also especially heart-breaking to see your final gate disappear because you caused a monster attack, and it's no longer lit up. As you play more games you can also increase the difficulty by adding new monsters or just more of the basic one. The second is some sort of pit fiend, which, when it is revealed turns every tile on its diagonals into pits which can break a run if it drops multiple keys or gates.
Two Player Review
The two-player review for The Nightcage is it's a very solid game. It plays well with two people, as mentioned each player takes control of two people, and it requires a deep level of communication of your plans and thoughts on the other players tile placements. For example, ‘you need to fill that space with any safe tile as if a pit fiend comes out here you will destroy our gate/key and then we are screwed’. My wife ever a strategist would meticulously lay out her tiles to great effect, I ever an optimist spent a good deal of time asking my wife to relight the candle I had inevitably managed to have blown out by yet another monster draw. For some reason she isn't as fond of my ‘winging it’ strategy as I am.
If you like Tsuro but want a cooperative not competitive experience of it, then The Nightcage is the game for you.
Likes
- It's a simple game not hard to teach or pick up but is not easy we found ourselves
constantly reevaluating our plans as the tile stack slowly dwindled.
Art style fits it very well its dark and dingy which the tile art represents well
There is a companion app to help you learn the game and teach it to you with sinister
background music the whole time
The candle holder for the tiles is awesome and a really nice touch
Dislikes
- Haven't really got any dislikes. This is never going to be your favorite game, it lacks a certain something for that, but it is a very solid and engaging game that is very light and easy to pick up.
Scores
Artwork- 4 out of 5
Replay ability- 4 out of 5
Player Interaction – 5 out of 5
Component quality- 5 out of 5
70 out of 100
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