Labyrinth

Labyrinth is a shifting-maze board game designed by Max J. Kobbert and first published by Ravensburger in 1986. Its original German title, *Das verrückte Labyrinth*, reflects the feature that distinguishes it from a fixed maze: the passages change during play. English-language editions have also used the title *The aMAZEing Labyrinth*. Rather than rolling dice to determine movement, players alter the board and then choose a route through it.

The playing area is a seven-by-seven grid. Sixteen maze tiles are fixed to the board, while thirty-three movable tiles fill the remaining spaces. A thirty-fourth tile stays outside the grid until a player pushes it into a row or column. The inserted tile shifts that line by one space and ejects a tile at the opposite edge; the ejected tile becomes the one available for the next turn. Arrows around the board mark the permitted insertion points. This arrangement means that changing a route to reach one treasure can also open or block routes for everyone else.

Players begin on different corner spaces and receive treasure cards showing objects they must find on the maze tiles. On a turn, a player first inserts the spare tile, then may move their playing piece through connected passages, as far as those passages allow. The player does not have to move after shifting the maze. Reaching the object shown on their current card completes that search and lets them move on to the next card. A player cannot simply undo the previous player’s insertion by pushing the newly ejected tile straight back into the same place. If a playing piece is carried off the board on an ejected tile, it is placed on the tile just inserted at the other end.

The goal is not merely to collect treasures. After finding all the objects on their cards, a player must navigate back to their own starting corner to win. That final journey can remain difficult because every intervening turn may rearrange the corridors. Labyrinth’s physical mechanism makes the spare tile as important as any piece already on the board: each insertion changes both the current maze and the tile the next player will have to use. The game’s distinctive design has supported many later Ravensburger editions, but the central sequence—shift a line, travel through the resulting passages, and pursue the next treasure—comes from Kobbert’s original game.