Table Talk Reviews Lairs is a two player competitive dungeon crawling race designed by Christopher Westmaas and published by Kids Table Board Gaming. Players are competing to join an adventurers guild and to do so they must be the first to escape their opponent’s dungeon with treasure or monster trophies. The components you see here are prototypes from my play at Gen Con, you can see the production quality components on KTBG’s Kickstarter campaign.
The game plays over two phases, the first is constructing your dungeon. Secretly behind your player screen, you will create a dungeon by placing walls, a start space, and an exit staircase. Walls can never entirely enclose an area, all spaces should be accessible.
Treasures, traps, and monsters will be placed as well throughout the dungeon. The only placement restriction is that there must be at least one path to each treasure that goes through a maximum of one trap and one monster.
The start player will be told which space they are in and any walls they see around them. Using action cubes, they can then move into adjacent spaces. The opposing player will describe the walls in that space and then any features such as traps, treasure, exit, etc.
Each player has two special action cubes. The green can be used to look into an adjacent space, which makes features known and gives you the advantage if you decide to move in there. The yellow cube can be used to hustle or backtrack. Hustle lets you run through up to 3 spaces, but you stop at the first non-empty space. Backtrack lets you move through as many known spaces as possible.
As you direct your opponent to move your adventurer through the dungeon, you will track your location on a dungeon sheet. On this sheet you can mark the walls and any features discovered.
Moving onto a trap will make you suffer a negative effect, such as fatiguing 2 cubes, which gives you less actions on your current and next turn. If the trap is known, you have the chance to disarm it first by rolling dice to exceed the trap strength. Lairs has custom dice with values ranging 1 to 4.
Similarly, moving into a space with a monster will result in a negative effect if you didn’t know it was in that space. If the monster is in a known space, you have a chance to attack first by rolling dice to deal damage. Defeated monsters are taken as trophies and some may have additional rewards.
Discovering treasure chests will earn you treasure cards, one from the face-up card row, and one random from the deck. Each treasure gives you some small amount of points, and may give even more points if a complete set is collected.
To win Lairs, you must find the dungeon exit after having collected 3 treasure chests, defeated 3 monsters, or collected 2 treasure chests and defeated 2 monsters.
Included in the game are several boxes and envelopes that add new monsters, action cubes, cards, and other components to evolve the complexity of the game.
