Price Range: $20
Age Range: 7+
No. of Players: 2-4
Time to Learn: 5 minutes
Time to Setup: 10 minutes
Reading Skills Needed: YES
Playtime: 20-30 minutes

Game Review: Awful, awful game. Such a disappointment. My son was so excited about this game after we saw the movie "Zathura." From the images on the box, the game looked an awful lot like the cool one the kids played in the movie, so I figured this would be a winner. I also thought the simplicity of it (roll to move on gameboard, draw cards for adventure) would be appealing. Wrong wrong wrong! First of all, this game is so poorly executed and engineered it isn't even funny. The game board itself is warped and won't lay flat on the table; this results in the game pieces sliding all over the board and players losing their places in the game. Then there's the fact that what should be the coolest feature of the game, the one that ties it completely in with the movie -- namely, the console out of which the playing card "pops" to tell you what comes next in the game -- does not work at all. The cards didn't pop out no matter how many times we loaded and re-loaded them, and fiddled with the dial and the button. We finally just pulled the cards out of the console and put them in a draw pile; it works, but completely wipes out what should have been one of the funnest aspects of this game. I am giving this game one star, only because the graphics on the box are so cool looking, and it looks neat sitting on our bookshelf -- which is where it will probably stay now that we've played it once.