Game Review- Bionicle Adventure Game: Quest for Makuta

This was brought round today by a friend who managed to get it cheap. So we decided to sit down and have a play through.

What struck me first was how cool this game looked. I mean, who doesn’t like Lego, Bionicle, and board games? This seemed a like it would be a great mix of the above. Looking through the rule book, this really seemed like a game that we could get our teeth into. There are various monsters, with different strengths, easy, medium and hard. There are also power ups which charge up your characters, and keys that need to be picked up. It was all looking good this far.

Next the game board. A hexagonal, jigsaw type board that is randomly generated and built as you play, each with varying amounts of monsters, exits, power ups and keys.

The goal of the game is to defeat Makuta, who's game tile will appear at some point in the game. Protecting him, there are a series of locks around the tile. Each one has a random set of keys (represented by tokens) that you need to have to get to battle him. What I like about this “boss” character is that he has varying different strengths, depending on where you come onto his board, and what number you roll on the dice.

All good so far.

The we started to play. And this game, as written, has one major flaw. Its to easy to level up. By the fourth turn of each game we played, at least one of us had a strength 30 character, and by the sixth to eighth turn, we all did. Now when the maximum strength monster is 28, (and that’s the boss), you end up just walking through the game looking for the keys and waiting for the boss tile to come out.

There is a power that allows you to steal from a character, and one power that allows you to warp anywhere on the board. But these are few and far between, and when you are powerful characters, there is just no point in using the steal, and the teleport just lets you win.

This game had so much promise from its looks, but just does not live up to it. We played as the rules say, and went back over the rules to see if there was something we missed, but there was not.

Also there are no actual Lego pieces in the box, which is not to much of a bad thing, but I feel that this could be a game that could use any theme, and the theme was pasted onto this to cash in on the Lego name.

All in all, nice pieces, bad use of mechanics. I am going to take a look to see if I can tweak the rules to give this some challenge, but I would just rather play a game that works from the box.

I need to play some better games!