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Build a team of amazing fictional and historical women to put escaped literary terrors back in their books! Can the Lady of Shalott defeat Dracula? Or Heidi and Ada Lovelace overcome a Kraken? Can Nzinga and Mary Seacole deal with the Martian Robots from War of the Worlds?
Library Labyrinth is a co-operative board game set in a cursed library that plays in about 45-60 minutes for 2-5 players and around 30 minutes as a solo game. The play space is a grid of 25 octagonal tiles that can rotate and flip, revealing (and changing) parts of the library. Some tiles spawn literary terrors, which players need to defeat by drafting different book cards from their hands. These book cards each feature a fictional or historical woman with a combination of six different skills. Team up different cards to defeat specific terrors, then travel through the library to place the terrors back on the correct shelves. The curse is still at work in the library, however, undoing your good work, so make sure that you don't run out of time or let the library become overwhelmed...
In more detail, on your turn you can pick up cards, trade cards, flip or rotate floor tiles, move down a lit path (as shown on the floor tiles), capture a terror, or put a terror back in the right shelf. You have three actions available with the option to donate one action to another player. After each player turn, a curse disturbance card is drawn, which disrupts the playing area by rotating a tile or spawning a new terror. When all six shelves have been filled with a captured terror, you win; if the deck of curse cards runs out or six terrors are left on the library floor before this happens, the game is lost.
Library Labyrinth is a quick game leading to ridiculous character mash-ups. Of course Alice in Wonderland and Marie Curie can deal with the Big Bad Wolf! The game can also scale between a game suitable for ten-year-olds and a fiendish puzzle. Floor tiles can be swapped out to make a harder grid, more difficult monsters can be used, or the amount of time can be reduced. Each game also comes with a booklet about the characters and the literary terrors in the game.
- Low-barrier indie vibe; supportive platform for indie creators
- Opportunity for future expansion with community input
- Limited public information on final mechanics and components
- Currently in the early-stage development and demonstration phase
- Exploration within an organized, labyrinthine library world
- Indie-projected game showcased alongside Paradise; labyrinth in an academic/library setting
- Cooperative or semi-cooperative with exploration elements
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- cooperative exploration — Players navigate a labyrinth-like library framework to achieve objectives
- tiered indie collaboration — Behind-the-scenes collaboration with indie creators emphasized
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Fame and Fable came out of me losing my spot as a dungeon master in a game of D&D.
- It's a deck builder card game you build up your hand full of allies and items and you essentially use them to defeat monsters and legends and gain Fame you're trying to become the most famous in the land and become named the champion of the realm fabulous.
- This is very Space-y in terms of these mechs are big they're thick... there are huge corridors and it's supposed to be cramped and difficult to navigate.
- The mechanism that drives it is basically a draw from the bag; you deal with what the zombies do and you have to balance resources and wounds.
- Simultaneous play is really fascinating for cooperative design because it keeps everyone involved and makes the moment-to-moment decisions feel organic.
- I’m super excited about the indie vibe; it’s a great platform for indie creators to show their work to players directly.