Die Pyramide des Krimsutep in which a bunch of glory-seeking adventurers actually dared to enter the ancient tomb of the long-dead pharao.

As with Die Baumeister des Krimsutep, a part of the playing cards contained in the game is used to for a playing area which is a square of 6 times 6 cards, showing the Pyramid of Krmsutep. At the beginning of the game these cards are divded into two factions of light an dark cards. These cards are separately mixed and then distributed into the playing area, with the light cards forming the lower and the dark cards forming the upper half of the pyramid. All these cards remain face down at the beginning, so that it will be up to the players to explore the pyramid and to reveal those cards.

It is the aim of the game to be the first player who actually succeeds in first carrying a Kanope (urn with ashes) and then a treasure out of the pyramid. At the beginning of the game, only canopes are available in the pyramid, and only when a player has succeeded in finding a Kanope and carrying it out of the pyramid a treasure will be taken and hidden in the pyramid by a procedure of taking up several pyramid cards and shuffling the treasure among them before re-distributing them.

A player`s turn is mainly driven by cardplay, with a player being allowed to play as many excarvation cards as he desires to do. These excarvation cards always shwo three possible kinds of actions, among them for example an ankh symbol increasing a player`s ankh-score, a secret passage, a torch allowing the banning of the frghtening mummy of Krimsutep or a god symbol. However, although the excarvation cards show three different actions, a player always only is allowed to use one of this actions.

The god symbols are used by the players for moving in the pyramid, since each pyramid card - be it already turned over or still face-down - also bears one of the five available god symbols. For his movement, a player looks up a pyramid card which bears the same symbol as the excarvation card he wants to play, and then he will need to find out if his total allowance of five movement points actually will take him to the new location. For this, a step over an already revealed pyramid card counts as one movement point, while a facedown pyramid card (which can remain facedown) costs two movement point to cross. However, when making the move and entering a still face down pyramid tile, a player always can opt to reveal this tile, in which case he will not allowed anymore to move freely over this tile but will have to follow the pathway as given on that pyramid card. Still, movement is not only a question of having the right excarvation cards, it also can be influenced by some special pyramid tiles like pits, ramps or secret chambers and also the rampant mummy of Krimsutep which is released when the first player has found a Kanope comes to hunt the players.

Overall, the game strongly reminded me of the old GAMES WORKSHOP classics Curse of the Mummy`s Tomb and Dungeonquest, and I this it would be quite correct to rate the game somewhere between both of them. Of curse, if you bear in mind that Die Pyramide des Krimsutep still is a cardgame you certainly will understand that the game is not as richly outfitted as the older classics, but still I was again surprised by the variety of playing components which the KRIMSUS people actually were able to squeeze into the small cardgame box. As for the graphics, the ilustrations on the cards fit quite nicely to the background of the game, with especially the adventurers being a quite funny looking bunch of somewhat familiar people. If you own the game, do not miss the free gameboard available at the KRIMSUS Website!