Treasures and Traps is technically a dungeon exploration game, but it is a bit of an abstract. The objective is to collect a Bronze treasure, a Silver treasure and a Gold treasure in order to win the game. You have two actions during your turn, which can be used to play a card and/or try to get rid of a card that is in play. Cards are either played in front of you in your ‘Realm’ or in the middle of the table in the ‘Wildlands’.

The cards have an Entry and Exit value that varies from 0 to 5, and you roll a six sided die in order to play (Entry) or discard (Exit) a card. You have to roll equal to or more than the Entry/Exit value in order to play/discard it, so in effect you can automatically play/discard a card with a value of 0. Discarding cards applies whether they are in your Realm, another player’s realm or in the Wildlands.

You can play cards on top of other cards that increase the Exit value or decrease their Entry value. You can also play cards like allies that increase or decrease the Entry/Exit value of actions or cards in particular instances. In addition to allies there are spells, events and monsters. The monsters usually capture/steal a treasure from an opponent’s Realm and take it to the Wildlands where it stays under the monster.

The stealing of cards is an important part of Treasures and Traps, and monsters are the main tool with which you steal treasures from another player. Once a treasure is in the Wildlands under a monster you can try to discard the monster with an Exit roll, and take the treasure if you succeed. The treasures can therefore swing back and forth between players during the course of the game, as they try to gain the upper hand.

Typically players will keep their Gold treasures in their hand until they are sure of winning, but the Gold treasures all have useful abilities, so it is a bit of a waste not to use them. With two actions you can happily keep one treasure in your Realm in the hope of laying two more treasures during the same turn, but typically you will fail the Entry roll on at least one of those treasures, making you vulnerable to attack.

Treasures and Traps works better with more players, although it has the potential to drag with five or six players, and would be frustrating if it exceeded 60 minutes. It has great interaction between players, because the balance of game play can easily change in one pass of turn, causing you to alter plans. The Entry/Exit roll concept is intuitive and different from other games, and simple enough for casual gamers to understand.

There are a lot of card games on the market, and Treasures and Traps deserves more exposure. It definitely has more theme than most, and is better than many that are nothing more than a variant on Blackjack or Uno. The artwork is fun and consistent, which is important for a card game like this. It is cartoony and that helps make it approachable even to most gamers.