I got the chance to try out Labyrinth yesterday. First thing I have to admit is that I really feel at sea with this game, similar to Twilight Struggle. There are no flanks, maneuvers or determined charges in this sort of war. It's clearly going to take a few games before I have much of a clue what to do.
That said, it was a lot of fun and very interesting. Compared to Twilight Struggle I think it's a little bit less complicated, but still seems pretty deep. It seems a little easier than it is in TS to avoid handing your opponent free events when you play operations because many of the events have conditions that must be satisfied in order to be triggered.
My first play through I played the Jihadists and I was pretty successful in bringing ing about Islamic rule, but Glen's US was pretty quick to stomp each one out and the US ended up winning by having more than twice as many resources under Good Government than I had under Islamic rule. Next time I'll spend more time recruiting and laying the proper groundwork.
I have to say that the components are absolutely gorgeous. There's a full-colr game rule book, a full-color Playing Book which includes a long and well-explained example of play, a nice mounted board, stiff and thick cards, counters, 15 desert tan colored blocks to represent the US troops and 15 black wooden Jihadist pieces with a crescent and star to represent Jihadist cells -- all of it packed inside one of GMT's famous "armored" game boxes that should stand up to considerable handling as geeks take it here and there for game session.
Altogether top notch in every way.
Volko does really tight designs, especially when he has such good developers on board (Joel Toppen, in this case). I've cut back my collecting to 20th C on and strategic Ancients, but I'll buy anything Volko designs regardless of era. Glad you're liking the game, I think it's a significantly better game than TS (the cards won't screw you quite as hard as they will in TS with the scoring mechanism - I've seen game after game go south because of that). And yes, the components are truly gorgeous, although I still prefer paper maps because I can a) put them in a poster frame for easier storage in mid-game, and b) because Ii can fit counter trays in the box. But that's just me. :-)
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