Quoridor Pac-Man from Gigamic World / Hachette Board Games UK

With Quoridor Pac-Man, you have the option to play either classic Quoridor or a Pac-Man like game. We’ve never played the original Quoridor so opted to play a few rounds both.

In classic Quoridor, the aim is to be the first to get your pawn (in this version, ghost) from one side of the board to the other. Each player gets 10 wall tiles (5 in a four player game) to try and slow down your opponent – you just can’t block them off completely.

To play the Pac-Man variant, 1 player is Pac-Man, while the other 1-3 players are the ghosts. Pac-Man wins if they eat all 4 power pellets before losing 3 lives. The ghosts win in if they catch Pac-Man before all the power pellets are eaten.

Our first impressions of Quoridor Pac-Man:

• We had a lot of fun playing classic Quoridor and trying to mess with each other using the walls. We could see how the more you play the more strategy would develop (e.g. it might be worth playing a wall against your own pawn to control how you get ‘blocked’).

• The giant version we got to play was very tactile – the clicky clacky of placing the walls and moving the pawns is very satisfying. We didn’t see the normal box (it was sold out), but from what we’ve seen online the components look good quality.

• It felt like the Pac-Man variant heavily favours the Pac-Man player. I played the ghosts and really struggled to see what I could do differently to win.

• The promo photos online and on the box are a bit misleading – they give the impression the Pac-Man variant makes more use of the walls. It actually uses a set layout with very few walls – combined with the potential unbalanced play this makes the variant feel a bit gimmicky (and not a ‘true’ variant as it doesn’t use the core Quoridor mechanic).

• Overall, the Pac-Man skin adds that extra bit of pull (I admittedly would have passed over the plainer original if that was at the Expo), but the Pac-Man variant itself feels a bit of a miss. If you haven’t got Quoridor or are a big fan of Pac-Man/retro games, this version is worth considering, even if you only play the classic Quoridor with it.