Labyrinth Game

     You remind me of the babe

          What babe?     
               The babe with the power           
                    What power?                 
                         The power of voodoo                       
                              Who do?                             
                                   You do                                   

                                        Do what?                                         

                                             You remind me of the babe                               

It's one of the greatest stories ever told. It's a musical fantasy epic up there with other classic cinematic milestones such as Citizen Kane, Ben-Hur, Apocalypse Now and Look Who's Talking Too. It's certainly the greatest film ever produced by George Lucas. It features a mixture of ground-breaking CGI* and puppetry**, and it stars Jennifer Connolly before she was legal and some bloke called David Jones*** as the goblin king. But for some reason no one has ever had the foresight to turn Labyrinth into a boardgame...

[Clarksonian pause]
 

 ...until now!

 

 

Maybe the film didn't do so well on it's initial release to warrant a board game release. But it certainly deserves one now, given it's current cult status.

No, I'm not going to make it. I'll let some other idiot do that. But I was inspired to make my own interpretation of the Escher-esque room in the middle of the labyrinth (see picture below). Then I figured, if you had an accurate 3D model of that room then you can turn it into a 3D board game with the use of magnets. It'd be like the not-very-scary Ghost Castle from the 1980's, but with an extra dimension. It could be the simplest dice game; a race from start to finish, or it could be a more complicated affair, with various different marked routes around the room: There would be four players; Sarah, Toby (the baby), Jareth, and Jareth's magic balls ball.

Well?... Laugh.
(more pictures available in the Arts Hole)

The idea is that each player has a target player they need to land on to win.

Jareth's chasing Sarah,

Sarah's chasing Toby,

Toby is chasing Jareth's ball,

and Jareth's ball is chasing ...Jareth? No wait, that can't be right.

Jareth is chasing Toby,

Toby is chasing Sarah,

Sarah is chasing Jareth... oh hang on, that's wrong again.

There has to be some other way that fits in better with the film's storyline.

So,... Toby is chasing Jareth, Jareth's ball is chasing Toby, Hoggle is chasing Sarah, and Sarah is chasing Jareth's package.

*The owl at the start is genuinely cinema's first ever CG animal.

**For the film, director/muppeteer Jim Henson created some very realistic creatures. You'd never have guessed that the life-like role of Sarah's step-dad was created with pioneering animatronics.

***I've asked around at Hollywood, David Jones is apparently the father of the excellent film director Zowie Bowie.