Race to the Treasure is a cooperative tile-placement children’s game for 1 to 4 players. Players work together to create a path, collect 3 keys, and reach the treasure before the ogre does.
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Pros
Pro Teaches a good variety of concepts
Race to the Treasure introduces children to concepts such as making choices, prioritizing, and planning. Adults can guide kids to the best choices and explain them, which makes the game a good educational tool. There are many meaningful decisions to be made – where to place the tile, how to plan a route, picking between a key, an ogre snack, or the exit, etc.
Pro Very easy
Race to the Treasure is extremely simple and can be taught in a matter of minutes to anyone. The mechanic is elementary – you draw a tile and place it. The tile can be either a path or an ogre. If it’s a path, then you decide where to connect it to the road you’re building. If it’s an ogre, then it’s added to the ogre track.
When you gather three keys and reach the exit, everyone wins. If the ogre reaches the exit first, you lose.
Pro Quick to play
Race to the Treasure can take a maximum of 20 minutes, which is short enough for keeping the attention of younger players and not taking too much time for adults.
Pro Fast to set up
Setting up the game is quick and easy. You place the board, shuffle the tiles, and then roll the two dice, one with a number and one with a letter, to determine where the keys and the ogre snacks are going to be placed on the 6x8 grid.
This also helps younger children with numbers and letters, so the setup can also be educational.
Cons
Con Luck-based
The tile deck contains 10 ogre tiles, if 7 of them are placed, then the players lose. Depending on where these tiles might be after the deck is shuffled, your game can often end with a quick loss or an easy win.
Con Might require some house rules
There’s a gap in the rules for a situation where you draw a straight tile and the only space to place it goes off the board, which might require the introduction of a house rule to solve – re-drawing the tile, discarding it, adding an ogre tile, etc.
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