I think anyone growing up during the eighties has an affection for the movie The Labyrinth.

It’s a classic fantasy adventure movie by the genius Jim Henson with a script by Terry Jones (of Python fame). It stars David Bowie as the goblin king, who also wrote and performed the soundtrack.

It has memorable characters bought to life by the Henson Workshop. Plus with the exception of one scene actually still holds up today.

I think because of this love for the movie I was a bit disappointed by the rather poor effort (going by the reviews) that was The Labyrinth board game. It had amazing miniatures but wasn’t backed up by game play.

But now we have something for the fans that from my initial impressions doesn’t look like disappointing in the shape of Labyrinth Adventure Game.

This just oozes quality when you open it up.

The actual sleeve for the book is above and beyond the sleeves I had on books before. It’s actually cardboard instead of a glossy paper. And although I love the art on the sleeve. I actually prefer the book without it. As you can see below you get this red fabric with gold lettering. It takes me back to some of the books my parents read to me from as a kid in the early seventies (yep I’m that old).

You open up the book and inside as the photo below shows are two dice to be used playing the game, plus a book mark with useful info on to be used by the goblin king (that’s what this system calls the game master).

So except for pencils, and printing out or photocopying the player sheets and goblin king sheet (you can get these from the publishers website to download and print) you have everything needed for a group of friends to have adventures in the world of the Labyrinth.

As you can see the book,looks beautiful inside. I really like the art style used.

Looking through the rules this morning during my daily soak this is a simple system, rules light even.

Character creation is basically choosing a race, a trait and a flaw. Followed by deciding what the goblin king has taken.

The actual adventure through the Labyrinth is split into chapters that represent zones within the Labyrinth. And these chapters consist of a number of encounters. Which I believe are mainly puzzle oriented. Reading the rules combat is very simple when it does happen.

Tests and combat/action revolves around the rolling of a d6. With a natural one being a fail. But roll a number equal to or higher than the difficulty set by the goblin king and you succeed.

There seems to be a bit of replay ability through the adventure built in, with no two adventures being the same. This is due to that when moving on from an encounter the next one is decided by rolling the d6 and adding the result to the current encounter number. Also,when revisiting a location/encounter there is a table to roll against to help decide what has changed.

At the back of the book is a chapter with tables to help a goblin king come up with their own encounters. Plus a chapter of photos from the movie.

This is a really lovingly produced product that does justice to the movie at last. I can’t wait to run this.