First Impression: 4th Corner

By W. Eric Martin
May 6, 2008

Publisher: Strategic Space
Designer: Mark Salzwedel
Players: 2-8
Playing Time: 10-120 minutes
Price: $14.95
Rules Language: English

Version: Production copy
Times Played: Twice with two players

“Leaves room for improvement” – that was the diplomatic response of my playing partner, quoting a teaching colleague of his that knows how to deliver bad news to inept students. My more unvarnished response?

“Hell to the no.”

The concept of 4th Corner is simple – an introductory game design concept, you might say: Escape from the maze and you win. Theseus faced the same challenge a couple of millenia ago, with the added complexity of a minotaur that needed slaying. Corn mazes have been a staple at farms across America for decades, and poor misunderstood Jack Torrence froze to death while looking for his son in a hedge maze. Fail!

I picked up Tom Jolly’s G.O.O.T.M.U. back in the early 1990s while working at a game store and played that silly thing at least a couple of dozen times. While the game was light on strategy, it was big on fun, with players wandering through a shifting maze, picking up crazy objects, avoiding a monster, and trying to assemble the three parts of their personal “get out of the maze unit” (aka G.O.O.T.M.U.) in order to win. It was advanced roll-and-move and worth the time spent playing.

4th Corner is much simpler than G.O.O.T.M.U. and lacks the fun that must be paired with simplicity in order to make a game like this work. The game consists of interior wall tiles (straight, elbow, plus, diagonal pairs) and exterior wall tiles (straight with and without an interior wall, elbow, one exit tile). Players start on a plus tile, and a turn consists of drawing and placing a tile, then optionally moving your marker one space. Interior wall tiles don’t have to line up, while the exterior – once the first brick section is laid – must expand continuously, looping around the interior walls until it eats its own tail.

The exit tile is added to the face-down draw pile once the fourth exterior corner has been placed. At that point, you can then start replacing interior tiles (instead of simply adding to the maze), which you might need to do if you’ve been boxed in.

Two problems doom the game play in 4th Corner:

1. You can create a maze that isn’t. The tiles are drawn randomly, so the red brick exterior of the maze might end up as a road to nowhere, stretching out across the table and not turning back. The rules state that you need to keep the interior tiles on one side of the exterior wall, but there are no restrictions on how to place the exterior walls themselves. Depending on the draw, you could even create a closed loop with the interior on the outside.

   Even when we adopted a “spirit of the game” rule in which we tried to force the exterior wall into the expected shape, we never came close to making the ends meet. Instead we would place interior walls next to the opponent in ways that would force the exterior elsewhere, ruling out any hope of closure, because…

2. Your strategy consists of being near the end of the exterior wall and hoping to draw the exit tile. If you do this, you’ll win. If an opponent draws the exit tile, then you’re unlikely to win unless that opponent is near the same open end of the wall.

   While the rules depict a closed border, which implies a tight competitive space that might allow anyone to win once the exit is drawn, the game didn’t turn out that way in practice. I’d place four interior tiles in a row to push the exterior away from my opponent. He’d trap me through the placement of one tile, and I’d release myself with the next draw since you can replace tiles at any time once the exit is in the mix. Ho-hum.

Want to try out 4th Corner for yourself? Perhaps not after that less-than-glowing review, but if you do, head to BGN’s new Games for the Animals page!

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