At the beginning of each round, each player draws nine tiles, comprised of various indoor and outdoor room types. Now we find ourselves at the game table, working to build two castles at once, simultaneously but separately collaborating with our left and right neighbors. This game is designed by Ben Rosset and Matthew O’Malley and it takes the best of Between Two Cities and Castles of Mad King Ludwig and marries it all together. In 2018, Stonemaier (in collaboration with Bezier) released Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig. I don’t own a copy of this game either, mostly because I only began collecting Stonemaier games after I fell in love with Scythe in 2016, and have focused heavily on acquiring new releases (vs picking up their earlier games). It’s a pretty unique approach to scoring and forces you to give both of your cities equal attention throughout the game. The player with the highest score at the table wins. At the end of the game, all cities are scored and the lower scoring city of the two we helped build is assigned to us as our final score. We build one city with the player to our left and a separate city with the player to our right each of our partners also contributes tiles to our respective cities in common. In BTC, players draft tiles and then use them to build cities collaboratively with other players. Since Surburbia was so close to my heart, I let go of any ideas to purchase Castles.Ī year after Bezier released Castles, Stonemaier Games released Between Two Cities. For example, I rarely keep both the card game and board game version of a given game in my collection – I force myself to pick one and let go of the other. After this discovery, I actually didn’t follow through with the purchase, as I’ve never been one who is keen to get every iteration of a game. Players purchase tiles from a market to build a great infrastructure, with various points awarded based on which tiles are used and how they are arranged. After a bit of research, I found the general consensus in the board game community is that Castles plays so similar to Suburbia that it feels like a reskin of the game with a castle theme. With the happy memories of the castle tour, I was drawn to Castles of Mad King Ludwig when it was released by Bezier Games a few years later.Īnother Bezier release – Suburbia – is in my top 10 list, so the positive track record with the publisher was another indicator that I’d probably enjoy Castles. With the snow falling softly around it, it was truly an amazing site to behold. It was *this* castle, by the way, that Walt Disney held in his mind’s eye when designing the Disney Princess Castles. The castle was never finished, King Ludwig II came to a premature end and within a year the political leadership had turned the castle into a tourist attraction. He fancied he’d build himself a castle in medieval style (probably because that was a time when subjects dutifully respected their king or perhaps because it appealed to his alpha-male decorating sense) and he spent his way through a good portion of the national treasury before the impoverished taxpayers had enough and called shenanigans. This grand and glorious castle (just up the hill from his parents’ country castle) was the castle to end all castles. The same could not be said for his next building project: Castle Neuschwanstein. Linderhof was one of the first castles he built and it was pretty modest so the taxpayers didn’t really bat an eye. So he consoled himself by building castles throughout the countryside where he would escape and fully immerse himself in his pretend kingdom where all subjects worshipped him and did as they were told. Alas, he was born much to late in Germany’s evolution for such things and was reduced constitutionally to being a mere figurehead (such as Queen Elizabeth II is in England today). He was very excited to be king and wanted to be a *real* king of the old order with power and dominion. I really feel for the poor chap Ludwig II. Years ago, on a snowy winter excursion to Bavaria, I took a tour of King Ludwig (Mad King Ludwig) II's castles.
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