Gamer’s Alliance
Herb Levy
Spring 2004
USA
An "amazing race game" is what Octiles offers.
As invented by Dale Walton, players begin with their
pawns (called "runners") on one side of the
board with the idea being to traverse the board and
end up on the other side. (With four players, 3 or 4
runners are used. With 2 or 3 players, 4 or 5 runners
are recommended.) Sounds simple? Well, not exactly.
The board is not static. Instead it is composed of
17 spaces for 18 octagonal tiles. The tiles are placed,
face down, onto the 17 spaces. The left-over tile is
called the "switch" tile. Four path
segments are printed on each tile and, when they are
placed, winding, crisscrossing paths are created. In
between, there are "stop squares" where runners
rest between moves.
On a turn, the first thing done is to play the switch
tile onto the board. The tile is played face up and
must become part of a direct path between one of your
runners and an unoccupied stop square or finishing circle.
The tile being replaced (which may be face up or face
down) by the switch tile is removed from the board to
become the "new" switch tile. Now, you move
ONE of your runners along a path that crosses the switched
tile to a stop square or a finish circle. That completes
your turn and the next player begins by placing the
new switch tile and moving one of his runners.
The first player to get all of his runners safely
across into the "finishing circles" wins!
This new version of Octiles is an improvement over
the previous edition published by Kadon years ago. In
a four player game in the older version, players began
with 5 runners for 17 open spaces. You do the math.
The board froze in place as runners were in the equivalent
of a rush hour traffic jam. Another problem: the old
rules allowed a player to ROTATE an octile. This created
myriad possible paths causing "analysis paralysis"
that froze game play in its tracks. Fortunately, in
this beautiful edition from PIN and Out of the Box,
those rules are gone and the game has only improved.
It now plays as great as it looks!
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