by Marc M, 25 November 2024
So, “first impressions” of a game that’s over a decade old sounds a bit odd, but with the release of the fifth printing of Labyrinth, the War on Terror: 2001 – ?, I’m making my first attempt at learning and playing the game and taking my first real foray into such a heavily card-driven strategy game. So, these are more accurately the first impressions of Labyrinth from someone who has almost exclusively played traditional hex-and-counter wargames.
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As the game’s two-player tutorial ends, and I begin playing on my own. I’m still pretty confused about what I should be doing, but I’m sure having fun figuring it out. When I first ran across Labyrinth, from designer Volko Ruhnke and GMT games, a couple of years ago, both the topic and time period really interested me. But when I realized it was a strategy game that relied on cards and regions rather than on counters and hexes, I passed it by. That was a miss. I picked up the computer version about a year ago but didn’t put a lot of effort into it…too unfamiliar. Another miss.
Thankfully I’m now more comfortable expanding my interests, so when I had a chance to look at a copy of the new 5th printing of Labyrinth, provided by GMT, I really wanted to give it a try.
Labyrinth is a one- or two-player strategy game where the United States battles Islamic extremists. In the two-player game, you and your opponent play as the extremists or Jihadists who want to spread their brand of government throughout the Muslim world or the US, who tries to stabilize Muslim countries to prevent the spread of extremism. In the one-player game you take the role of the US, and a bot system or decision tree system represents the Jihadists. I’ll be talking about the two-player game here.
Labyrinth Gameplay
The battle of ideologies plays out on a 22-inch by 34-inch mounted board centered on the Middle East but also representing the US, the UK, India, China, Russia, as well as countries in North Africa and more. Labyrinth comes with 120 cards and turns consist of rounds of two card plays per side, followed by the resolution of any Jihadist plots. The number of cards the US player receives each turn can decrease depending on how many troops are deployed. The Jihadists need to keep their funding high to have maximum cards available for play. More cards in your hand means more options.
Similar to Twilight Struggle and Fort Sumter, cards have operations point values and can trigger events.
- Operations points let the US take actions such as deploying troops (tan cubes), improving Islamic governance, disrupting Jihadist cells, and stopping terrorist plots.
- Operations points let the Jihadists recruit cells (black cylinders), move cells from country to country, lay plots and launch jihads to degrade governance, enact extremist Islamist rule and more.
- Events are neutral or associated with either the US or the Jihadists. Neutral events typically benefit whoever plays them, while of course US and Jihadist events benefit that side.
- You can play neutral events or those associated with your side. You can play any card for operations points, but if you play an opponent-associated card, you usually trigger the opponent event, helping their cause.
There’s more. Much, much more. But all contained in just 12 pages of rules, with another couple of pages for the single-player rules. There’s a playbook with a few rounds of a tutorial scenario for two-player and single-player games. The play book is nice. It walks you through setup and the key concepts and tells you specifically what rules you need to read as you play. If you wanted to, you could just start with it and be playing in minutes. But soon, you’re on your own and you’ll need the rest of the rules to really know what’s going on.
Learning Labyrinth
Very basically, in Labyrinth you try to steer other countries to your side, flip Jihadist adversaries to allies, degrade US prestige, increase or lower the number of cards you or your opponent gets each turn, store up reserve troops or cells, employ or stop weapons of mass destruction, and on and on. Some cards block events, some have lasting effects, and other cards end those effects. There are several ways for each side to win, centering on combinations of resource control, stabilizing governments, imposing extremist Islamist rule, and destroying US prestige. Or triggering a WMD event in the US.
The rules aren’t incredibly complex, though there are lots of variables that determine available actions and options differ depending on which side you’re playing. That makes things harder. I’m still referring to the rule book regularly. The two player aids – one for each side – help, but while with some games I’ve been able to rely almost exclusively on player aids, I’m still bouncing between the player aids and the rulebook. I’m sure that will get better, but for now, this really makes it hard to plan.
On the bright side, I can see that figuring out all the possible ways to play your hand is really interesting. Deciding how your choice might affect what your opponent plays, calculating whether you need those operation points enough to trigger the placement of a new Jihadist cell, determining the best way to spend the points, and so on…this is where the challenge of the game and the enjoyment lie. There are so many ways to play. And yes, in a traditional wargame you also create a plan and anticipate and adapt it as your opponent plays out their own plan, but while in a traditional game you’re carrying out your plans with units and armies, in Labyrinth you’re doing it by setting up and triggering events. It’s a couple of steps removed and that’s a lot fuzzier for me.
Final Thoughts . . . for now
Labyrinth is really different from the strategy games I spend most of my time on. The conceptual, open-ended nature of the game is really challenging to get my head around. I know how to do something, but I don’t always know why to do it or when. Or why to not do it. But I enjoy the challenge of having to think a different way and part of the fun is figuring out the best of a few paths to get the result I want. As I play a few more hands, if I’m not totally getting it, I’m at least starting to see how enjoyable the moves and countermoves are. I know I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my first playthrough, but I’m learning. While it’s taken a bit longer to pick up than I expected, I’m enjoying that learning and entering that just-one-more-turn phase. If you’ve given a thought to trying something quite different from a board covered with hexes and counters, Labyrinth is worth a go. I’m glad I got the chance to try it, and I’m now a bit more likely to again try something new.
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