Temple Crush: Crushing It

Temple Crush is based on a fairly simple and obvious idea really. There are blocks and meeples in most euro games and ancient temples and pyramids are full of booby traps involving massive blocks dropping on people. At least such is my understanding from a range of movies. As such I set about designing a game where meeples run into a temple looking to nab some gold while blocks try to squish them.

The primary mechanic I wanted to get working was shoving the blocks back and forth as new ones come in so that areas are closed off until you clear them and you risk being squashed from the side, which has seemed to work pretty well. The game uses an escalating danger system with more blocks dropping as players claim victory points and has a sort of built in time limit when the blocks get too impassable, the co-op elements are mechanically a little similar to Pandemic but look so different on the surface you’d be hard pressed to notice.

I originally designed it as a co-op game, just because I seem to think solo and co-op first, in fact the basic co-op board is solo designed. Obviously, the chance to drop blocks on your friends is too good to pass up but the co-op board had to be much tighter than the vs board, because no one will be intentionally placing blocks in a bad place on it. As such in the full version with the vs mode there is an entire separate board with far more block placement areas and more space for meeples, so you can happily block your friends (literally) without ruining your own day. Probably.

As for issues, there was a system originally where the outside columns of the board would move in when they filled with blocks as the walls closed together. Thematically it was lovely and it worked mechanically, but it was fiddly to implement and made set-up too complex for a quick little print and play game that takes 15-20 mins to play so it had to go. There was a bit of a balance issue with players not having enough freedom. Possibly with three actions they can do a little too much but I’ve opted for the game possibly being a teeny bit easy over it being a little boring. In the end players are free to shoot for whatever score they want so the difficulty is pretty easy to adjust and its cooler to be dodging in and out of blocks rather than just giving up early because you can’t go back out. Not that it’s a risk but you that you just can’t. Now there is more freedom and hopefully more of a sense of player power.

The base set is available free to download right here and it’s a pretty simple print and play build so there’s no excuse not to stick on your fedora and see what ancient treasure you can nab.

Temple Crush is the latest of our free to download series of print and play games. It is a fast moving game of temple robbery and brutal traps.

The free version comes with everything you need to play the co-op and solo versions of the game. In the full version this is expanded with the vs mode. Play consists of moving your meeples through the temple grabbing treasures and avoiding blocks.

Check out Temple Crush, a game of derring do and fetching fedoras.

Download the free version here.

Purchase the full version for £1 in our shop here.