As I mentioned in my review of Fortune and Glory, I am a huge Indiana Jones fan who is frequently disappointed by the lack of good Indiana Jones table top games. Now, the Indiana Jones DVD Adventure Game certainly doesn't qualify as "great," but believe it or not, it is surprisingly entertaining.
At its heart, this is a tile-laying dungeon explorer not unlike Dungeon Quest. Players explore an ancient underground temple, scoring points by fighting villains and escaping traps, all while searching for the big treasures: the Lost Ark, the Sankara Stones, and the Holy Grail. The three major relics are worth a lot more at the end of the game, but they are also more difficult to acquire, requiring the solving of multiple DVD puzzles, and it is possible to win the game by quantity rather than quality, spending all your time escaping minor traps and fighting villains via what amounts to virutal dice rolls using the DVD interface.
The game's physical components are of surprisingly high quality, with nicely illustrated cardboard temple tiles and coins, and better than average plastic pieces of the Lost Ark, the Sankara Stones and the Grail, as well as the Indiana Jones figures.
The DVD features of the game almost seem like an afterthought. Other than the more elaborate memory puzzles that need to be solved to get the big treasures, there isn't much on the DVD that couldn't be done by rolling dice. It would only take a few nudges to make this into a very playable non-DVD board game.
Rating: 3 (out of 5) For a merchandising tie-in, this game is a lot more fun than it has any right to be.
- Indiana Jones DVD Adventure Game on BoardGameGeek.com
- Indiana Jones DVD Adventure Game on Amazon.com
Date played: March 8, 2014