Labyrinthine (board game)

Labyrinthine is a fantasy dungeon crawling board game designed by Pete and Judy Kerestan and published by Wee Warriors in 1977, notable as the first fully modular dungeon crawl game to reach the market. Rather than a single fixed map, the box supplied dozens of small paper tiles representing rooms and hallways that players arranged and rearranged to build a different dungeon layout for each session, an idea that later, more elaborate tile based dungeon games would build on at much larger scale. One player controls a party of adventurers making their way through the maze to rescue a captured princess and then escape with her, while the other player takes the role of the Evil Wizard who built the dungeon and wins either by defeating every hero or by killing the princess after she has rejoined the party. True to the era's cottage industry production values, the whole game shipped as a four page rulebook, fifteen sheets of paper terrain tiles and paper counters for the heroes, guards and monsters, with the designers themselves advising players to glue the pieces onto cardstock for durability before play. Contemporary and later reviewers found the actual session to session experience tedious to set up and repetitive to play compared with the more polished dungeon crawlers that followed it.