Hello and welcome back on Recensioni Minute
time for another preview in preparation for
spiel 2017, and this time I'll talk you about
a 100% Italian game
that I've been able to play early
with the publisher itself
I'm talking of Dragon Castle, a game by
Lorenzo Silva, Hjalmar Hach and Luca Ricci
for 2 to 4 players, lasting about
45 minutes per game
published by Horrible Games.
After I tried it with them
I convinced them to give me
this box of the final prototype
to show it to you in preview.
This means the game materials are still not
100% final but they still give a precise idea
about the looks of the final game.
During each round a player can
choose between 3 kinds of moves
they all start in the same way, you must take
from the topmost floor of the central zone
an available tile.
A tile is available if at least one
of its long sides is not adjacent to other tiles
so in this case this tile or this other one
are not available.
First kind of move: you take a tile,
then a second tile from any other
floor, it must still be available
and it must have the exact same symbol
of the tile you have just taken, in this case
with the same number of swords.
The tiles collected this way
must be placed in your play area either
on a free space or on one of the tiles
you previously turned face down.
Like this.
Second kind of move: you take one available
tile from the topmost floor,
you place it in your play area, then you
take a Shrine from the pool.
Third kind of move: you discard one available tile
from the topmost floor, then you
collect a victory point.
When we place our tile
in our play area,
if we created a set of four or more
tiles of the same color,
regardless if they are on different floors,
we'll have to consolidate them, that means
to flip them face down like this
leaving them in the same place they were before.
Then you will obtain points based
on this diagram.
We just consolidated 5 tiles,
so we'll instantly collect 3 victory points.
Then, depending on the color of the tiles
we will be able to place on the
consolidated tiles 1 Shrine,
or 2 Shrines or even
2 Shrines and a victory point, so in this case
I collect 3 victory points and I decide
to place a Shrine in this place here.
You keep playing like this until
there are tiles left on the
ground floor only. At that point
a fourth move is available:
instead of taking a tile you will be able to
take this small token in its place, that
is worth two points at the end of the
game. When all the tokens
have been taken from this area
the final round is triggered and you sum up
your points. How? You convert your Shrine into points
depending on the floor they have been placed at.
A Shrine on the first floor is worth
1 point, then 2, then 3. You also add
the points for the dragon tokens
you collected until now
and the winner is of course
the player with the most points.
The strong point of this game,
as you probably noticed, it that it's
very easy to explain and to understand.
His real strength then lies
in the optimization you'll have to do
on your board, so you will be
pushed in two directions. On one hand you
must try to build big sets
before consolidating them
to score a lot more victory points
during the game. Consolidating
an area of 8 tiles gives you 8 points,
consolidating an area of 4
only gives you 2.
At the same time if you do this
you won't build a lot of tiles on the upper floors,
and remember, a Shrine on the third floor is worth 3 points
while a Shrine on the first floor is only worth 1.
So you'll have to consolidate more often to
build on top of your previous tiles.
As you can see, even without
analysis-paralysis you will have
a lot of things to think about. On top
of this there is a pleasant kind of
player interaction. It's not
direct for sure, but sometimes
it can be destructive. In fact
it's rather easy that if a player is
collecting all the more desirable
tiles, like the dragon ones that allow you
to place 2 Shrines when you consolidate and give
you 1 point on top of that, he's creating a big set
and he just misses one final tile
to consolidate the whole thing
it's rather probable that the other players
will take that last one remaining
dragon tile; another
very mean move is to leave
a player with a single tile on the topmost floor
so that he is forced to take it
without having a choice
and you have a whole new unlocked floor
full of tiles to choose from
Once you played your first game
and you have learned these
basic notions
you'll discover this is just
the beginning, because the full
game will have you add at least
an animal spirit and a dragon. What are these?
They are cards drawn by two different
decks of 10 cards
The spirits will give
a special ability to all players
that can be activated by discarding a tile
or a Shrine, they can modify
the things you can do during the game.
Some spirits will allow you to
move tiles, or take tiles
that only share their color,
or for example even taking
adjacent tiles even if they are unavailable.
On the other hand the dragons give you
additional ways of gaining points
at the end of the game. Some of them
give you points for the symmetry
of the tile building you made, other will
allow you to make points for the
Shrines you placed next to dragon tiles.
In some other cases you'll make points for
the number of different symbols you have
on the topmost floor.
As you can see, there are many possibilities
and I say at least 1 spirit and
at least 1 dragon because they
are all compatible with each other
so if you really want to
test your skills you can even use
10 spirits and 10 dragons... and good luck.
If you still have perplexities about
the longevity of this game
I'll tell you that in the rulebook
you will already find alternative
setups, different from the ones I showed,
that are optimized for 2, 3
or 4 players. Different setups
will give you different feelings during the
game, some have more available tiles
so it's difficult to force the moves
of the other players. In other cases
you will have a lot of blocked tiles
so you will have to carefully plan when
you can take 2 tiles,
or 1 tile and 1 shrine, or 1 tile and 1 point.
Of course you can also create your own, and
there will probably be a lot of fan made ones.
So if you had doubts about the longevity
I think you have a clearer idea now.
I invite you to give a try to this
Dragon Castle. I will also tell you that
the first game in the "easy" mode
I showed you before,
with four players,
rarely goes to 1 hour of gameplay
including the explanation of the rules.
There's a bit of setup to do
because you need to prepare all the stacks of tiles
but that is a way to
get confident with the game materials.
That's all folks! See you next time!
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