Review on 🧩 HABA Karuba: The Highly Addictive Puzzle Game from Germany by Jhon Clark

Karuba is a good puzzle. It bills itself as a multiplayer game, and I hesitate to say it's a great example of that simply because it has no player interaction. It's almost like bingo, in that the player leading the round announces which tile everyone should place, and then everyone places it (or discards it to move the explorer). That can be good, sometimes you need a very passive background experience. But I think the aspect of four people playing solitaire keeps it from reaching the five star mark for me. I actually had a pretty good time playing solitaire. At first glance, this doesn't make any sense - playing for points doesn't work, as drawing a tile can be very different from game to game. Instead, I order and randomly place all of my explorers and temples based on d12 rolls. From then on, I play as normal, except each temple costs entry (1 gold or 2 gems seems right) and my goal is just to get to each temple. It's a nice little brain workout. The quality of the components in the game is good, the tiles are in no way inferior to the tiles of Carcassonne, for example. Pieces are good too, I love gems very much. All in all, a fun, light game that lends itself to fairly passive gameplay.