Cardboard Corner: Review of Chabyrinthe

I will start by saying, after four years of regular board games at my house Chabyrinthe is still the biggest surprise in our collection. Coming in a small tin only slightly bigger than those in which they sell mints, inside is a game I have played more than any other with my small son. Playful yet intelligent, simple yet requiring lateral thinking, those cute cats just need to find a way through the labyrinth of roof drains and street canals to a new home.

Boiled down to a single thing, Chabyrinthe is a logic game. A 4x4 grid of cards is laid out on the table. Each card has a water drain of some type. Some are intersections, some are curved, some go over/under, etc. At points around the perimeter are laid two homes and two cats, and it is the players’ job to align the labyrinth of drains and canals such that a cat has a path to a home. Each player having two moves on their turn, they can twist or shift the cards to realign the labyrinth, trying to create a path. Each cat has a number of points printed on it (3 through 5), and the player who collects the most points by getting cats to homes is the winner. The whole game takes anywhere from 15-30 minutes, depending on the age of the people playing—the older, the shorter.

The production of Chabyrinthe is very simple: a handful of cards in a nice, neat tin. Artwork is stylized and appropriate. But not fabricated; each of the fifteen or so cat cards has its own, unique artwork, as do the two homes. In fact, my small son ignores the points on the cards, preferring to get the cat with the art he likes most to a home.

In the end, Chabyrinthe is one of those great games that can be enjoyed by children and adults alike. Adults do have an innate advantage, but it’s subject to how the grid plays out. Kids can still compete. I was even able to play a simplified version with my son when he was three. Now that he is five, he can mostly compete with dad. Overall, the game encourages lateral thinking skills, pattern recognition and matching, and testing scenarios to find success, but does so in a fun, cartoonish way that slips past my children’s awareness they are learning.