Ice and Idols: The Labyrinth of Your Childhood, All Grown Up and Cast in Plexiglass

There are boxes you open, and boxes you assemble. Ice and Idols belongs to the second kind, and that first encounter leaves a mark. Before you even play a game, you have to peel the protective film off every sheet of plexiglass, then slot the labyrinth pieces in one by one. The components are frankly stunning, but the operation cost me two or three hairline cracks while pushing the pieces into place.

Nothing broken, nothing that stops you playing, but enough to understand right away that you are handling an object as spectacular as it is delicate. Once the temple is built and set on its central pivot, the tone is set: you do not play with material like this every day, and it asks to be handled with care.

Publisher: Inside Up Games (Conor McGoey) · Designer: Mat Hanson · Art: Edu Valls · Year: 2025 · Players: 2 to 4 · Playtime: 45 to 60 min · Age: 14+ · Mechanics: pick-up and deliver, modular rotating board, action points, scoring track · Language: language-independent (a French edition is yet to be confirmed) · Price: to be confirmed (available at Philibert and Imaginaire)

A Temple That Shifts Beneath Your Feet

The starting idea is crystal clear and already tells the whole story: you are an archaeologist let loose in the frozen ruins of a temple, and your job is to fetch idols from one spot and deliver them to another. On paper, that is classic pick-up and deliver. Except the board is built in two layers. Underneath, the ruins fix the pick-up points and the drop-off zones for each of the five idols. On top sits a grid of pathway tiles bristling with walls that you move through, and those paths loop from one edge of the board to the other, with the facing of your pawn mattering on every move. In other words, the shortest route is almost never a straight line, and it never stays the same for long.

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Because the temple moves. Every time an idol is delivered, an event triggers: a tile collapses and disappears, the board rotates 90 degrees, a row or a column shifts across, or, with a bit of luck, nothing at all. The path you patiently plotted for your next turn may have vanished by the time your turn comes around. On your turn, you have five action points to spend as you like: one point to move to a connected tile, one to pick up or drop an idol, and the rest to fire off powers. That is where the whole game lives: optimising a hand of five actions on a board that refuses to sit still.

The Labyrinth, All Grown Up

If you grew up with Ravensburger's Labyrinth, you will recognise that opening feeling, those sliding corridors that slam the door in your face. Ice and Idols takes that spark and grafts a real management-game depth onto it. The first layer of development is what you do with the idols you deliver. You get a choice: send them up the research track to score, or slot them into your personal tableau to unlock a permanent power. And those powers change everything. The sapphire grants you one extra action per turn, the tiger's eye lets you carry two idols instead of one, the jade lets you rotate the whole top layer, the ruby turns a single isolated tile, the gold slides a tile one space over. You no longer just suffer the chaos, you learn to aim it at your opponents.

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The research track, for its part, is a little game within the game. Each idol dropped there places one of your cubes, and the scoring values of the columns keep moving during the game until a track is locked in, so you are betting on which colours will pay off big at the end. On top of that, a secret key card hands you a precise pattern to rebuild with your cubes, hard to pull off but generous in points. Add an adrenaline token that grants an immediate extra action at the cost of two fewer actions next turn, plus four characters with their own abilities, and you get a game that reads light in the rulebook and turns out far more devious once the board is spread out in all its disorder.

What Hits Home, and the Flip Side

The first thing that strikes you is the table presence. Few games give off this sense of a temple genuinely crumbling under your fingers, and the plexiglass has a lot to do with it. On substance, the pleasure comes from the constant tension between unlocking a new power and scraping together points, two appetites you can never satisfy at once. The rules explain themselves in a few minutes, the illusion of simplicity drops away with the first event, and that is exactly what you want from a game in this family.

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The flip side, as you have gathered, starts before the game. The initial setup is long and calls for a delicate touch, and the fragility of the plexiglass pieces deserves a warning: go gently on assembly, my hairline cracks are proof enough. In play, a board that reshuffles itself endlessly can put off players who like to plan three turns ahead, since their plan rarely survives a single one. That is a deliberate stance, not a flaw, but it targets a specific crowd. We played at three, and at that count the pace stays fluid and the board readable: you soak up just enough chaos between turns to stay on your toes, without ever waiting too long for your turn to come back. I suspect that at four the unpredictability and the downtime stretch out, and that the game breathes better at two or three.

Verdict

Ice and Idols is a fine success for anyone who loves living spatial puzzles and pick-up and deliver that actually moves. It is the labyrinth of our childhood, all grown up: deeper, tenser, more beautiful, and a little more fragile too. Bring it out to wow two or three players who accept that a plan never survives long past the first event, take your time on assembly, and let the spectacle carry you. A quick aside for the component lovers: Inside Up is doing it again this year at Essen with Kalypso, another all-plexiglass game that looks just as gorgeous. The publisher has clearly found its signature, and I am not about to complain.