Classic Dungeons & Dragons at Dungeon Masters Guild

The Adventure Continues: A Review of ‘The Adventurers: The Pyramid of Horus’

Elliott MillerDec 23, 2011

Game Name: The Adventurers: The Pyramid of Horus

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games

Designers: Guillaume Blossier and Frederic Henry

Year: 2011

Players: 2 – 6

Ages: 13+

Playing Time: 45 Minutes

Retail Price: $49.95

Category: Adventure Board Game

Components:

8 unique Adventurer cards
8 well-sculpted Adventurer figures
3 detailed Mummy figures
9 easy-to-attach bases
5 colored dice
Over 100 colorfully illustrated cards

From Fantasy Flight Games:

Descend into an ancient Egyptian pyramid with The Adventurers: The Pyramid of Horus, a standalone board game of danger and exploration for 2-6 players. In this fast-paced and tense experience, whichever player escapes from the pyramid alive and with the highest Treasure value wins the game. Will you emerge bearing priceless archeological treasures or will you succumb to the mortal dangers waiting inside?

As an Adventurer you can explore the pyramid, searching for archaeological relics hidden or buried in four chambers or corridors. But perils haunt your pursuit of treasure, and falling stones threaten to trap you inside forever if they obstruct the only way out. Adventurers must also be wary of hidden threats that can wound them and living mummies who roam the corridors!

Disturbing a cursed pyramid has its hazards, but there is no adventure without risk. Can you make it out alive and wealthy or will this ancient Egyptian tomb be your final resting place?

The Adventurers and The Pyramid of Horus is the standalone sequel to The Adventurers and the Temple of Chak. The first game was a tough, fun time with smashing walls, a rolling boulder, a collapsing bridge, and tiles sinking in a lava pit. It was easy enough to get killed that they gave you a second character to use if your first one was killed.

Well, the fun is back in the Pyramid of Horus, with a few changes, some for the better and some for the worse. In this version you are racing in and out of an Egyptian Pyramid. Along the way you will face poisonous snakes and scorpions, crocodiles, mummies, and a collapsing ceiling. The object is the same: run in, grab as many treasures as you can, and get out before the collapsing ceiling traps you in the pyramid forever.

I’m not as impressed with the components of Pyramid as I was with the original. Don’t get me wrong, they are high quality, but most of the box is taken up with 36 plastic blocks that will slowly take over the board. There are nice figures and three mummy figures that look great. There are character cards, many smaller treasure cards, some colored base clip-ons, and five colored dice. What? No Boulder? How about sliding walls? Nope. Ok, what about the snakes? They are on cards. What about the scorpions? The Alligators? They are on cards too. There are the mummies, but I was disappointed overall that it wasn’t as flashy as the original.

That’s not to say it is a bad game. In the original, one false move and you were dead. You then had to wait until a certain moment to pull your other character in, and by then you’re biggest concern was to get out alive. In Pyramid, you take wounds. The wounds count toward the amount of stuff that you can carry. As in the first game you get a certain number of actions each turn based on the roll of the dice and the amount of treasure you were carrying. Carry too much and you move like a snail, ensuring your swift demise. The wounds that you take add to your weight rather than kill you, so you get to play the full game with one character, but you’ll get slower and slower.

The pyramid itself is basically one big room separated into a couple of sections. You get in the same door that you get out, so there is no need to worry about working your way through a maze to get to the exit. Or is there?

Each turn, you roll the dice and determine the number of actions everyone gets based on the amount you are carrying. You can move or search with each action. When you finish up with your actions, you roll the dice and move the mummies. The mummies wander up and down the corridors lining three sides of the pyramid. Then you select a block at random from the box, flip it over and see which number is on it, then place it in the corresponding numbered square on the board. If someone is unlucky enough to be in that square, they get smashed by the block and take a wound card, unless there is no where for them to jump to, then they are just dead.

The important thing to remember is that the characters cannot move diagonally. You have to work your way around the blocks. If at any time your path is completely blocked by the falling stones, you are trapped and the game is over for you.

One note about the blocks, there are numbered stickers provided that you place on the underside of each block. The only problem is that the 6 and 9 are identical, so I’d recommend underlining them so you can tell the difference. Yes there is a small discoloration in the corner of the stickers, but it is barely noticeable, go with the underlining.

The first section is the Cobra Nest, searching here allows you to draw a card from the rubble deck. It might be a snake though, which gains you a bite. Similarly, the scorpion pit and crocodile pond work the same way and have their own decks to draw from, which can earn you a bite or a sting. The treasures get progressively better as you get deeper into the pyramid, but you have to be able to get out again.

The mummies’ corridor which lines the temple is where you can open up sarcophagus and raid them for treasure, or try to get one of the five idols on the walls. The mummies walk up and down these corridors though, and if they come in contact with your adventurer you will take another wound that you can’t get rid of. At least all of the other wounds you take can be removed by different pieces of equipment that you can also find in the treasure decks.

The equipment is another new feature to this version. These can help you in different ways by removing wounds or even helping you to predict where the next block will fall which comes in very handy. The characters all have special abilities that you can use once per game, similar to the abilities in the original game.

That’s all there is to it. Run in, grab what you can, and get out before the blocks stop you from escaping. The player with the most treasure who makes it out alive wins the game.

When I first started playing the game, I thought that the mummies moved and the blocks dropped after each player takes their actions. This led to really fast games and games with four or more players ending in three to five turns. It was thrilling and tense and the pressure was really on. We never even made it to the back wall unless it was a two or three player game.

So then I was looking something up in the rules and realized that we were playing it completely wrong. After all players take their actions, then the mummies move and the block drops. This really took the pressure off, the games started lasting the full 45 minutes rather than the 20 I had grown accustomed to, and unfortunately the excitement level dropped a bit. The mummies are hardly a threat at all and easy to avoid, and it suddenly seemed like we had all the time in the world to get what we wanted and get out. The survival rate jumped substantially.

It still moves fast enough to get several games in, and it is fun, don’t get me wrong. Get too greedy and you will never finish at all, just like in the original. It has more random chance as you can never tell when the game will end, it’s all up to the luck of the draw for the blocks. The game could last four turns, or 25, you just don’t know. It is a good game with some nice changes, but if you are going to compare it to the original it is more of a Jaws 2 than a Godfather Part 2.