This weekend, I broke out my recently purchased copy of Treasures & Traps for a Sunday afternoon family game session. The participants included myself, my wife and our 10 year old son. The 6 year old was off playing outside and wasn't ready to play with us yet. It took us about 10 minutes to go over the rules and explaining the various cards and actions possible.

I sat back reading the cards that had been dealt to me. I was in no hurry, as I was going last after the wife and the son. The game was pretty easy to learn, but I wondered if the family understood completly and how the game would play out. Well, I soon found out that they had no problem with understanding the game. On her first play, my wife hit me with a Door card, basically causing my only action the first turn to be an attempt to defeat the door. That, however, wasn't the worse of it. After she completed her turn, my son proceedes to place a Dungeon on top the Door, increasing the Exit number of the Door from 3 to 6.

Next was my turn, and having no choice, I rolled the die. Of course, I failed to get the required 6. And this, predictably, made the family laugh to no end. For the first few rounds of the game I managed to do nothing but roll the die in an attempt to defeat the door. This let the rest of the family get an early lead on treasures.

I seemed to be the favorite target of my son. Once I managed to finally defeat the Door/Dungeon combo and start to get cards in play my son hits be with another Door card. This went on for several round. Defeat Door, get hit with door. I haven't heard my son laugh like that in a long time. He really enjoyed slapping those doors on Dad and keeping him from getting anything going.

To make matters worse, once it seemed like he finally ran out of Door cards, I drew the Gauntlet silver treasure which gives a bonus for defeating doors. I think that was just the game mocking my unfortunate turn of events.

My son was making good progress and had a Bronze and Gold treasure in play and I was sure he was on his way to victory. On my next turn I played the Royal Edict, changing the victory condition from one of each treasure type to three of one treasure type. Needless to say, my son was not pleased! At this point, I figured I had the game locked as I had one silver treasure in play and two more in hand. I was sure to win on my next go!

My wife, as always, had a different plan. She played a card (I don't exactly remember the card name at this point) that had everyone pulling cards from the opponent on their left. Of couse, my son removes the silver treasure from my hands by pure luck and karma at this point. Luckily, I managed to get a silver treasure back when I pulled cards from my wife.

The game when on for a few more turns and I managed to eventually pull out the win by having two silver treasures in play with a gold treausre, then using a Morph card to turn the gold treasure into a silver one.

We all had a great time playing the game and there was much laughing, roleplaying and general merriment. My son continued to remind me throughout the day how he had been able to lock me down for much of the game with his Doors. I just smiled. That is why I game. To have fun with them and create memorable times. I'm glad such a simple and inexpensive game was able to to that for the family. I'm sure we will be playing this one more often.