Game Night Light 13

Monday was the weekly game night.

The beer exchange involved:

Both were tasty, although I was a lightweight drinking just one of each.

This week we tried out The Castles of Burgundy. I had to punch out the counters. This was a game I bought in search of a regular game night candidate before Catan got entrenched. "Hail Klaus".

Each player has their own unique board for tracking and building their own resources. Plus a main board for tracking victory points, turn order, and resources that players compete for. There are castles (which you can place on dark green hexes), buildings (brown), farms (light green), knowledge (yellow), and ships (blue) available for placing on your map. Plus resources like trade goods, money, and workers. For the most part, you can take two actions per round and there are 25 rounds in 5 phases. Center board resources are reset every phase. And with more players there are more center board resources.

The game is for 2-4 players. It is a much more complex version of  Catan in some ways, and might be considered a form of SimCity. You win through 25 rounds of play by getting the most points. There are different ways to get victory points including trade, buildings, expanding your kingdom's contiguous footprint, trade, agriculture, and probably other things we didn't notice. Note that the trade is not with other players.

The game was frustrating at first because the rules were kind of fragmented despite being brief. So it was slow going resolving questions. We both started worrying about the suitability of the game and whether it can really be played in 90 minutes. We started wishing we'd watched a tutorial video first.

But we resolved problems and before the first phase was over we were moving faster. And in the second phase it moved at a rapid clip. We ended the game at 10:04 after the second phase.

We used different strategies to get points and it seemed pretty balanced. Although you really need to know the rules to play effectively in using the different means of getting points most effectively. We did not have that detailed understanding. But we did have the mechanics down pretty well.

Although there aren't the opportunities to shout "You bastard!" that Catan so often provides.

All in all, this would be a fun game for a higher participant game night.

Once again, a successful weekly game night!