"Robin Hood", "Paws of the Lion", "Break in Alcatraz": board games put to the test

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We tested these games: "The Adventures of Robin Hood", "Break in Alcatraz" and "Gloomhaven - The Lion's Paws"

Photo: Maren Hoffmann / DER SPIEGEL

Oh, why is the heroic swing of swords so often preceded by a miserable existence as a leafing bookworm!

There is a rift through the round of games: some would like to play a tactical knockout with a lot of trimmings, others feel that they are not challenged to the maximum by human-annoyed-you and immediately decline if the rulebook is more than half a DIN standard - A-5 page includes.

Fortunately, there are also big games where you can start very quickly without having to bother with complicated rules - and which still offer many tactical options and plenty of atmosphere.

Here are three new adventures for cooperative game play.

(And when you're through, here are five games you can learn in under five minutes.)

»Robin Hood«: Completely free movement

Photo: Maren Hoffmann / DER SPIEGEL

We see a forest.

Ways.

A couple of houses and a castle.

On closer inspection, the opulent picture shows small, numbered tiles that are embedded in the game board: there is a lot going to happen here.

Michael Menzel is not only a game designer (quite a few should know his family classic "The Legends of Andor"), but also a graphic designer - and as such it pained him to have to split his pictures into fields so that one knows how far one can move and where what happens.

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With »Robin Hood« he has presented a masterpiece: The players can move freely on the board - how far is regulated by special, long figures, each of which gets three.

In your turn you can place it on your piece and place your own second piece at the end of the row.

If you reach a tile in this way, you can often turn it over.

And then - where there was just a carriage - suddenly there is only a street.

For this, a carriage appears in the castle courtyard.

This makes chronological processes visible.

In your turn, colored action discs, which you pull from a bag, decide.

Whether an action succeeds, dice that come out of the same bag - white is good, purple is bad.

Whether the sheriff's bad guys threaten your own figure also depends on whether you have put yourself in the shade or posing in a clearing;

so you have the feeling of really sneaking through the forest.

The preparation of the game is so simple that you hardly believe it: You jigsaw the game board from eight pieces and pour all the wooden pieces next to it.

The game includes a thick adventure book that tells the story and sometimes confronts players with decisions that affect the progression.

You start with a single, richly illustrated instruction page, and you're all set in the Sherwood Forest.

Up to four players can go on an adventure together, ambush nobles, defeat the sheriff and free prisoners.

Even if you play individual chapters several times, the repetitions are limited.

Two to four people aged ten and over, each chapter lasts around one hour

Hand on it:

families, newcomers, aesthetes

Hands off:

gross motor skills and people who don't like reading aloud

"Paws of the Lion": On your hat, you monsters!

Photo: Maren Hoffmann / DER SPIEGEL

The ten-kilo game »Gloomhaven«, a fantasy chunk with countless monsters, characters and hundreds of cards (more about it here) has made gaming history: It has been the undisputed number one on the board game nerd page »Boardgamegeek« for years.

However, the hurdle for playing along is high.

On the one hand, the game is quite expensive, and on the other, it is complicated - you can hardly get a grip on it without an auxiliary app for tracking the campaign, which consists of many, many chapters, with its character developments, unlocked locations, objects and events.

Actually, you also need the second app that simulates how the monsters move on the game board.

Basically, »Gloomhaven« is not really complicated, just infinitely diverse and ramified.

The charm of the game is that the characters you play have completely different skills;

everyone has their own set of cards, which enable very different actions - the monsters automatically act with their own deck of cards.

You have to be very tactical to defeat everyone.

With »Paws of the Lion« Isaac Childres has now presented a slimmed-down version of his great work, which tightens the game a lot without losing any of its appeal - even hardcore Gloomhaven players think it's great.

Together you fight your way as a mercenary troop through a gloomy world full of unsavory monsters, in which death lurks at every corner.

The campaign takes place in a book in which the fixtures are conveniently printed on the pages;

and although the game is tactically complex, getting started is easy because you start with very few rules and are guided through the first scenarios in an exemplary manner.

You have to coordinate well with each other to have a chance - and after a number of rounds you are really a conspiratorial group that identifies very much with their characters.

For one to four people aged 14 and over, playing time per round half an hour to two hours

Hand on it:

fantasy friends, role-players, newbies

Hands off:

Peace-loving pawns who prefer to breed sheep rather than slaughter monsters

I!

want!

there!

Purely!

- »Break in Alcatraz«

Photo: Maren Hoffmann / DER SPIEGEL

This is really break-in news: After all the Escape games (the Kosmos-Verlag alone has sold seven million copies of the various games in the Exit series) there is a new series in which you urgently want to go somewhere.

Older semesters would like a Gerhard Schröder edition with a small vibrating fence ("Break in Chancellery"), but the first pentagon-shaped box goes back further in history and leads to the infamous prison island of Alcatraz.

Our pals are trapped there and we have to break in to help them break out.

The game comes as an initially locked box, which, like a Japanese box of tricks, opens up gradually, level by level - by solving puzzles in which you always have to find a symbol, a color and a number.

A nice mechanism with evaluation strips shows whether you were correct, if not, it leads to a tip card.

The puzzles are sometimes very simple, sometimes very fiddly;

quite a few are based on the model of mathematical word problems, in which you have to cut various time spans against each other in order to determine who can be where and when.

Others need more creative thinking skills or courageous experimentation.

On a five-point scale, the Alcatraz problem should have level two - but that seems to be classified arbitrarily.

It is a shame that the box is not processed better.

A little more stable cardboard would have been nice.

Commendable, however: if you play them carefully, unlike the exit games, you can reset them and pass them on.

The second game in the series is "Break in Area 51".

For one to six people from the age of twelve, depending on the ability to think about two hours.

Hand on it:

Everyone who likes escape and exit games and wants to try something new - or want to tell them that they are now trying something new without actually becoming unfaithful to the genre.

Hands off:

gross motor skills and people with poor eyesight.