Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8930245/cinderella-at-midnight

Designer: Amanda Kastner
Publisher: StorySeamstress Games
Artist: Amanda Kastner

Cinderella at Midnight is a solo only card-laying maze style game set in the magical world of Cinderella! Each turn, players draw cards to add to their maze tableau in the hopes of completing certain tasks in a specific order before time runs out. There are two stages to the game, the garden phase and the palace phase, each with similar objectives but a few changes here and there. You have to successfully complete the garden phase before you can move to the palace phase. Honestly, it’s a really cute and thematic game that’s fun and simple!

This game plays as expected: you draw cards then must place them adjacent to Cinderella’s current position and move onto that card if possible. Besides the standard maze routes, there are also secret passages that can be utilized. In the garden phase, the tasks are to befriend the mice, find a gecko (not sure where this fits in thematically), and then pick a pumpkin and make it back to your starting space. For the palace phase, you must locate keys, meet prince charming, and drop your glass slipper, and then again make it back to where you started.

Apart from the standard maze puzzle, there are a few additions that are fun and increase the challenge level some. First are locked passages which are paths that require a certain task to be completed before they can be used. The main hardship, though, is in relation to time. On the garden side, there are bells located around the map. Any time Cinderella passes through a bell (and there are bells on the secret passages), you have to advance the clock one step. If you make it past twelve o’clock, you lose. Thankfully, there are locations that allow you to get back some time (serenity spots) and swap some cards around if needed. In the palace phase, if you travel on a card with a clock, then the time advances one space and you typically have to move, flip, or swap some cards around as well. The palace side has no assistance in terms of time, and on the contrary, actually has a way you can immediately lose the game – if you run into the same stepfamily member twice!

As I mentioned, and if you can’t tell from this description, the theme implementation here is actually really impressive. Not only is the artwork beautiful and fitting, but the tasks and automatic loss conditions, both time and the stepfamily, also follow along well with the story we all know and love.

A few other highlights of this game for me include the portability of the game, the double sided maze cards for the two phases of the game, the card layouts and artwork are both very impressive, the double sided Cinderella standee used to move around the map is really neat, and the time tracks create really nice tension and add a layer of strategy. The serenity cards and shift cards are also a fun and interesting addition that can be very useful.

On the other hand, I do have a few critiques as well. First, success in this game is very luck dependent. Yes, there is some strategy in terms of placement and route selection, but if you don’t draw a card that lets you befriend the mouse in the first five or six cards, you are going to have a hard time completing all the tasks before time runs out. I also think the game struggles in the replayability department. Of course, the order of cards drawn will always be random and different, but besides that, each game is the same. I wish there were varying difficulty levels or more unique task cards to make each game feel fresher. The rule set is also a little weak. There could have been better explanations, in my opinion, and it’s tough to really understand the game without looking at the cards and playing a little bit. My last complaint is that the added card rotation and movement required from the time aspect on the palace side is a little extra. It’s tedious to keep up with and uses precious brain power for a relatively unimportant occurrence.

Overall, this game is creative, fun, slightly puzzly, surprisingly thematic and is exactly what it claims to be. It’s a pretty basic maze game – besides the theme and maybe the serenity cards there’s nothing massively original or interesting, but that doesn’t necessarily take away from the enjoyment.