Components:Excellent quality, the artwork is especially good on the board and the cards. The player meeples are good but do suffer from falling over as players bunch up on the board squares, also the cards to show what colour player you are the red/orange are way to similar and you have a purple card but a black meeple.. not an issue but a bit of a shame everything did not match up better.
Gameplay:At the start of the game players are dealt one of the 9 character cards, on the bottom right of the cards are symbols showing what that player will start with, a number of gems and possibly a machete, most importantly it shows there starting position on the game board. After this initial placement all the cards are handed back to the start player who is the person at the back of the race.
The cards are shuffled then the start player deals out a number of faceup and/or face down depending on the number of players, then selects a card from the remainder. The rest are handed to the player on his left and so on until everyone has chosen. The start player then announces each character in order and the player who character is called reveals the card, takes a gem from the bank and takes the action of that character. This continues until everyone has taken their turn.
There are certain spaces on the board with chance tokens, these have both positive and negative results on you race to find the lost temple. There is also a chance token that gives someone the start player for next turn which helps mix things up a little. There is also several space of Deep jungle which you need to have a machete to move through otherwise your movement ends on that space.
Each of the characters has a unique ability that helps you in someway on you quest to find the lost temple and a careful choice and use of these characters is essential to doing well.
The character mechanic is similar to
Citadels as is the downtime this produces whilst people ponder their selection, though once you are more familiar with the roles this should get a bit faster. Otherwise this is a very different game from Citadels and is good fun to play.
The winner is the first person to land on the Lost Temple (There are two on the board, the first is used with 6-8 players the 2nd for less players)
Conclusions:I really enjoyed this game, I have only played it with the full 8 people so far but even with this number it was fun and not overly long. It certainly engenders a lot of banter around the table, with everyone having a good time.
I like the characters better in this than Citadels, there is still plenty of opportunity to mess with someone's turn but still leaves them with something to do, whereas I felt in Citadels some of the characters were overly cruel and could sometimes stall someones ability to play a turn for too long.
All in all an extremely fun game that will certainly get a lot of play with my group.
