Review – Temple Twist

Temple Twist is a puzzle game in which players work together to navigate a cube through a 3D maze. Throughout the game, they will add and remove walls and turn the structure in an effort to make the cube reach its destination. Let’s check it out!

Review

Temple Twist sounds like a game you might have on your phone, and it plays like one too. In this game, players cooperate to complete a maze before they run out of moves.

The game revolves around a 3D temple, essentially a 4×4 grid, 1 space deep. The temple has slots between its 16 rooms where wall pieces can be added or removed. 2 walls are permanent, denoted by black and yellow lines.

To set up the game, players randomly insert 5 walls, and they draw a number of room cards and a single door card. (The more rooms they draw, the harder the challenge will be.) Each room card corresponds to a space in the temple, and in order to win, players will have to visit all those rooms and then exit through the appropriate door.

A large red die marks players’ position in the temple. Each player receives a hand of action cards and the game begins. On a player’s turn, they play and resolve 1 card. Action cards are removed after use, so they also function as the game timer; if players run out of cards before they complete the puzzle, they lose.

There are a few types of action cards:

• Cards that let you add or remove walls (either 1 or 2)
• Cards that let you move an existing wall to a different slot
• Cards that let you rotate the temple once, twice, or freely (the temple always rotates in 90° increments on the XY axis)

The strategy comes from positioning walls so that the die will fall to a particular spot when the temple is turned. Whenever the die lands in a room shown on a card, that room card is completed and turned over. Once all rooms have been completed, players must get the die to the required door, which must be on the ground level.

Temple Twist also includes variants which can be used to increase the difficulty. Challenge cards add extra restrictions/requirements, and expedition cards offer light campaign/scenario play. Additionally, the die can award bonuses based on which faces are showing through the temple windows.

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Overall, this game sounds more fun than it is. The idea of twisting and turning a 3D maze, while moving walls around, sounds cool and interesting. In reality, though, it’s a fairly blasé puzzle, weighed down by a number of issues.

First, this game feels like a one-trick pony, and it gets repetitive quickly. While the variants provide some nice challenges, they don’t really change how players approach the strategy. At a basic level, every game feels like the same puzzle, just with a different set of rooms, and the novelty of the 3D temple wears off quickly.

Second — and I haven’t mentioned this yet — this game has a limited communication mechanism as well. The rules state that players cannot discuss the cards in their hands, and this seems entirely superfluous. It feels like just an artificial way to make the game harder, but it doesn’t make it better.

And there are smaller issues beyond these. For example, when moving the temple, sometimes the die doesn’t go where players expect. Players might have a path of walls in place, ready to guide the die when the temple is turned, but if the die takes a weird bounce, it can veer off course. It’s frustrating to have done all the right things in the puzzle, only to have random chaos derail the progress. Besides this, it can be awkward trying to see the symbols on the die through the temple windows.

My best experiences with Temple Twist have been playing it solo (it’s great to not be bound by that limited communication rule). Even as a solo game, though, it’s hard for me to recommend this one when so many better puzzle games exist. Temple Twist is a cool idea, but in practice, it’s not interesting enough to keep me engaged. If you see it being played at a convention or game store, it might be worth sitting in to give it a try, but it’s not a game you should go out of your way to track down.

A review copy was provided by KOSMOS.