Print and Play Deconstruction

CUBE: The Print and Play Game

The Cube print and play game was loosely based off of the movies- a story based on a cube-like structure which acts as a prison to a certain number of people (players).

The objective is fairly straightforward- find the escape. The escape is labeled as "Goal" in this game,  but the tricky part about finding the "goal" is that the board is constantly changing, so someone might not ever be able to find it.

The GOAL card appears above, next to the START card. When the game is set up, pieces are arranged face down in a 6x6 square (with an exception of the start card, which is face up). From this point, players choose who they want to play as (some characters have advantages over others), but everyone starts on the START position, obviously. The position of the goal card (when being played) is unknown to the players because it was shuffled around with the other cards and placed face down.

The core mechanic involves players only moving up, down, left or right, and after moving, they flip the cube card that they moved onto. Some of the following images are examples of cards the player might land on:

 If a player happens to land on one of these squares (instead of a blank tile like the ones shown in the previous set of images)- they roll the dice to determine how much damage they take based on what type of trap they landed themselves in. I think this is a pretty neat way of handling a game mechanic. An example of how this would work would be;

If I land on the "needles" card and roll anywhere from 1-5, I will take one damage (and I only have 3 hearts, so that removes 1/3 of my life). If I roll a 6, I will take no damage.

The space of the game is pretty interesting- as I mentioned previously, the board is constantly changing. This mechanic was implemented to reflect the suspense element of the movie. I quite enjoyed this mechanic, actually!

There are items (objects) in the game called "shoes" which allow the player essentially peek at a cube next to them, which they are thinking of moving to. Regardless if the cube is a trap or not, the player has to get rid of one of their "shoes" but they don't have to move to it if they don't want to. They look exactly like this, and aren't actual drawings of shoes. These would be considered operative and resultant actions, in addition to the general movement mechanics.

Skills that the players learn: Players can sort of memorize where certain squares are if they play long enough and can keep track of how the tiles rotate, but if I have to be honest, it's quite a task to undertake. It also somewhat breaks the immersion if the player is attempting to do this, but it could quickly lead to victory. If you decide to not do this, which I suggest you don't, the game becomes mainly up to luck, where you move and what you roll (if you wind up having to roll to take damage). When we played, Dio didn't take ANY damage, didn't land in any traps, but he didn't wind up winning the game, Steve did.

So, all of this being said, the game is fairly straightforward and does a really great job at explaining the mechanics (the rotation part was a little confusing at first but I think we got it down). There aren't any interesting graphics which is fine, because that's not a super necessary element to the game, but it would definitely make things a little more appealing, visually.