Disclaimer: A copy of Between Two Castles: Essential Edition has been provided by Stonemaier Games for review purposes
In a lot of other media types, mash-ups and crossover events are some of the most exciting moments. In comic books, having Spider-Man appear alongside the X-Men had fans frothing, heck, Deadpool & Wolverine was the second highest grossing movie of 2024. In music, mashups were exciting, combining the best and iconic moments from several songs into one banging track. While board games have had some iterative designers, such as Uwe Rosenburg with Agricola and Caverna, or taking an existing game and putting a new spin on it, a la The Crew and The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game, there really haven’t been a lot of direct mashups.
Stonemaier Games already has a pedigree of inviting collaborators to use their games to build something bigger and better, like taking the Wingspan game by Elizabeth Hargrave, and spinning off the more complex Wyrmspan by Connie Vogelmann and the less complex Finspan by designers David Gordon and Michael O’Connell, but again, these are iterative designs. New games standing on the shoulders of giants, borrowing core mechanisms, but introducing new ideas.
In 2018, Stonemaier games released a true mashup. Designers Matthew O’Malley and Ben Rosset took their game, Between Two Cities, and smashed it into Castles of Mad King Ludwig by Ted Alspach. If you’ve never played either of those two games, let’s talk briefly about how Between Two Castles: Essential Edition plays.
Sitting between each player, lays a castle. Each round, you’ll pick nine tiles into your hand. You’ll choose two to keep, and place the rest face down next to your neighbour. When everyone has made their pick, everyone reveals the tiles they kept. Then, you place one of the tiles they kept into each of the castles on either side of you. Each of your opponents will do the same. You’re collaborating with your neighbours, trying to build both of your castles to be the best they can be, as the castle of yours that scores the lowest will represent your individual score at the end of the game. Once you’ve placed a tile into both castles, you’ll pick up the seven tiles your opponent left you, pick two again, and on and on the game plays until you’ve completed two whole rounds. Then, you’ll score each of your castles and declare a player the winner.
If you have played Between Two Cities, you might be thinking “That’s exactly how Between Two Cities plays, where’s does Castles of Mad King Ludwig come into the picture?”. Well, how each tile scores is lifted directly from CoMKL. Each tile is a room, from activity rooms, to dining halls, to outdoor gardens. Each type of room has a different scoring objective, such as being adjacent to other rooms of specific types, or earning points for all the tiles of a type in a single row or column. In addition, when you get 3 rooms of a single type into your castle, you earn a bonus based on that room type. If you’ve played Castles of Mad King Ludwig, all that will sound very familiar.
Now we understand how each parent game donated its traits into Between Two Castles, I’ll briefly touch on what separates the 2025 Essential Edition from the 2018 original. And the answer is functionally nothing. The Essential Edition contains the original base game, the Stories and Soirees expansion, plus the two promo tiles that have been released. But if you were just looking at the player aids and the rulebook, you’d never know that the secret rooms or the ballrooms were originally expansion content.
Now, I said above that Between Two Castles feels cooperative or collaborative, and it does. You are working with your two neighbours to build the best castle possible, because your individual final score is equal to the lower score of your two castles. But it’s still a competitive game, there is only be one winner at the end of the night. But the friendly nature of the game ensures that no one has bad feelings during gameplay, except for the pangs of jealousy as you watch your partner to your left confer with the person to their left as they decide which of the two tiles they drafted are going to go into your shared castle.
Between Two Castles: Essential Edition plays up to 8 players seamlessly. Much like how 7 Wonders scales up in player count so easily, each round you’re only really interacting with two other people. Your hands of tiles will flow around the table, and much of the thinking time and decisions happen simultaneously. There aren’t many games I’m willing to play at 7 or 8 players outside of party games, but I’d consider this a contender against 7 Wonders if I know that everyone at the table has some experience in the board game hobby.
All the rooms score differently, and you earn a different bonus when you get 3 or 5 rooms of the same type in your castle, which can spiral out the number of choices you need to make. Teaching Between Two Castles is kind of a pain, as by the time you’ve explained the 9th room type, no one really remembers what the first types of rooms do anymore. Thankfully, the game comes with 8 player aids which do a fantastic job of reminding you of the important information, once you have the context of the rules in your head.
Ever since I first laid hands on Wingspans rulebook, with it’s wonderfully luxurious linen finish, Stonemaier Games production quality has been second to none in my eyes, and that remains true here. The rulebook is big and clear with helpful examples, the tiles are thick and beautifully illustrated, although some of the iconography on the tiles is a bit small. The GameTrayz contains the game beautifully, and makes it a breeze to ‘setup’. You literally plop the trayz onto the table, and tell everyone to grab a stack of tiles. Bang, you’re already into the game. For ease of access, Stonemaier games earns top marks.
I had played Between Two Cities once before, and thought it was pretty fun. I am a big fan of Castles of Mad King Ludwig, so I was excited to experience this mashup. What I found was a fun, easy to teach game that felt friendly and collaborative. Everyone was working with their partners well, conspiring to maximize the points on both their castles. The tile drafting created some interesting decisions as you can pick tiles, knowing what your partner is going to get next round, and just hope that they (literally) pick up what you put down. Between Two Castles has the satisfaction that comes from building and pulling off a plan with a partner that makes cooperative games so popular, while also giving providing one player the satisfaction of victory over your opponents.
Many of the scoring objectives are going to pull you and your partner in opposite directions. Maybe you’ll be wanting to place a specific tile because it’ll score 4 points for the orange tiles in a column, while your partner will want to pick a specific colour tile to gain the bonus for having 3 rooms of a single type. When you start triggering those bonuses, the game really starts to sing. The downside is that some of the bonuses can make for some much longer turns as players take time mathing out how to maximize their points, between drawing new tiles, or cards and placing everything perfectly. A slight frustration when they spend 10 minutes debating where to put something, and the difference between the two options is a single point.
Onto the question that needs answering. Is Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig greater than the sum of its parts? For my money, no. As a big fan of Castles of Mad King Ludwig, I’m left feeling sad that the bidding mechanic and whimsical and wacky castle designs were stripped away. But there is no denying that Between Two Castles is the more accessible option. It’s cooperative drafting, fun scoring style, seamless scalability, and polished production make it a fantastic choice.
Between Two Castles: Essential Edition is a wonderful game. If you have larger player counts, it’s an obvious pick, as it scales from 3 to 8 players perfectly. It’s fast, unlike many other games that can support that many players, it’s gorgeous, even if the iconography is a bit small. There are two solo modes and a 2 player variant, the expansion content is folded in so seamlessly that you’d be left wondering what’s different between the essential edition and the base game. The puzzle tickles my brain just right, and while it doesn’t surpass the heights of the original Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Between Two Castles offers a unique and interesting spin on the scoring mechanics from CoMKL. This game is well worth a spot on my shelf.
I’m always on the lookout for interesting twists on action selection mechanics. From the most basic systems to interesting worker placement mechanics, to rondels, and everything in between, I find the way that games let you take actions to be a fascinating puzzle. Sometimes, when it’s too restrictive, I feel frustrated. But when there’s tension and trade-offs and I get to make interesting decisions, that’s when I feel the joy for board games that really hooked me into this hobby in the first place.
Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done is a 2018 game by Seth Jaffee, and originally published by TMG (RIP). In Crusaders, players embody an order of knights that have a call to spread their influence across medieval Europe.
The theme is kinda weird. The crusades are a dark subject, considering the tragedies that were wrought at the hands of knights in the name of religion. It’s also weird that the holy lands aren’t even on the board, which was kinda the point of the crusades. Not to mention that the “crusade” action on the rondel is to crush or eliminate your enemies so you can build your house on their land. On one hand, I’m woefully ignorant of the historical nuance of the crusades, but when you name and theme your game after religious wars, but then do nothing to address the history of the event, it just feels a bit weird.
That’s all that I really have to say on the subject. As far as a euro style board game goes, Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done holds a pretty satisfying puzzle. Each player has a rondel of actions on their personal board, and a number of action tokens. When you want to take an action, you choose one of the rondel wedges, take the action with its strength based on how many action tokens are on that action, then, you distribute the action tokens clockwise from that action wedge.
Alternatively, you can choose to upgrade any of your wedges, which lets you flip it over and reveals a second action available for that spot. Now, when you take that action, you get to split the action points between those two actions. When you upgrade a wedge, you may choose to distribute the action tokens from any of your wedges, which is real handy when they’ve all bunched up on an action that you don’t want to take yet.
If there’s something Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done is lacking in, it’s player interaction. You can get in each other’s way by being the first to build in a spot, as each hex can only hold one building, and in the higher player count games, real estate is at a premium. The other way to interact with your opponents is by crusading before they do, as a successful crusade makes the respective tribe stronger. There’s nothing pushing back against you, nor is there any mechanism to thwart someone who is starting to run away with the game. The most you can hope to accomplish is to sidle in and accomplish something before they can.
I’ve found Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done to be wonderfully replayable. Each player gets dealt two of the knight orders, each one with their own special ability and different number of starting action tokens. In addition to that, your action wedges have a randomized location each game, making certain synergies easier or more difficult to achieve.
The gameplay and flow is really smooth. Unlike another popular mancala game, Trajan, Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done has you choose the action, then you move the action markers, making it really easy to see at a glance how strong your actions are as opposed to moving markers and taking the action where the last pip lands. Each of the actions on the rondel are straightforward and easy to execute, and you only get to do one action per turn until you upgrade your action wedges, then you get two. This does make it difficult to pull off a cool or amazing combo, but it also means that it doesn’t take very long for your turn to come back around to you. It’s only slightly frustrating when you see someone about to do something before you, but you don’t really have a way of accelerating your engine to beat them to it. Just play better, I suppose.
My real gripe with Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done is the fact that one of the actions on your rondel is literally “take victory points”, which is just boring. And what’s worse, some reports on BGG say that really focusing on that action is a reliable strategy. I hate it when the boring play is the good play. Building buildings offer you some points, as does crusade, but the ratio of action points spent to victory points earned isn’t equal, suggesting that almost always, taking victory points is the right thing to do. I want the victor to be the one who built the most, or travelled the furthest. Not the player who sat at home and just raked in the points (I know this is addressed in the expansion).
Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done is full of choices, but limits what you can do on your turn. The only interaction is someone getting to a spot before you, which is usually well telegraphed in advance. It’s an efficincy puzzle that I love to get behind. The gameplay flows well, and as you build your buildings, your actions get stronger, and you start to really rake in the victory points, creating a satisfying feeling of momentum. While some of the actions could be more exciting, I still easily recommend Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done. It’s a fast play for a medium weight euro, and the action selection mechanism is a fun puzzle to play with.
The best board games tell a story. In Galaxy Trucker, you’re transporting pipes across the galaxy by building ships out of them and hurtling through space. In Food Chain Magnate, you’re the CEO of a burgeoning fast food empire, as long as you can stay one step ahead of your opponents. In the Hall of the Mountain King, you play as trolls who were forced out of their home by the gnomes who took up residence in the halls the trolls built. But Earth is on your side, and collapsed in on those gnomes. Now, each troll clan is embarking on re-tunnelling through the mountain to unearth statues and place them in their rightful, honourable spots next to the heart of the mountain.
Designed by Jay Cormier and Graeme Jahns, with art by Josh Cappel and Kwanchai Moriya and published by Burnt Island Games in 2019, In the Hall of the Mountain King is a polyomino tile laying game with some strict resource management driving it. You start the game with a row of basic trolls, and on your turn you either need to recruit a new troll, bringing more resources into your control, or spend resources you control to dig some tunnels. The unique part of the game comes from the trollmoot, which is how you gain more resources. When you recruit a troll, you build a pyramid with your cards, and a newly acquired troll activates themselves (which produces the resources on that card), and every troll below them.
If a troll has resources already on their card, they don’t get to produce again, creating a really frustrating moment of wanting to be efficient and producing the resources you need at the moment, but also not wanting to waste potential resources by producing resource before all of your trolls are ready to receive them. It’s a fascinating resource management puzzle.
Most of the resources you’re collecting are used in building tunnels. Instead of hiring a troll on your turn, you trade in those minerals you collected to build a tunnel. The number of minerals you trade in determine the size of the tunnel, while the quality of minerals determine how many victory points you earn from that build. When you place a tunnel, you might need to spend hammers, if you’re attempting to hew through particularly hard rocks, and if you lay your tunnel on spaces on the board that have a resource or statue on it, you get those benefits.
The statues are one of the main way to score glory (or victory points). Another resource your trolls provide you are carts, which are spent to move those statues from tunnel to tunnel. The closer to the centre of the mountain those statues are, the more points they’re worth. And if you can get them onto a pedestal of the matching colour, their points are doubled. The other way to amass points is to turn your tunnels into great halls. By building large squares of tunnels, you can choose to dedicate it into a hall, and if you manage to arrange a statue into a place of honour, it’ll bring you even more points. Who knew Trolls were so into feng shui?
By now, you might notice that all the aspects of In the Hall of the Mountain King are tied together fairly well. You get trolls to get resources, spend those resources to place tunnels on the board, which earn you points. But the game tries to pull you in different directions at once. You need to build towards the centre of the board to have your statues be worth points, but all the statues and bonus resources are along the edge of the mountain. You want to save your minerals to build a big tunnel, but you have very limited number of opportunities to produce resources. Once your trollmoot is full, you may trigger the end of the game.
Actually, it’s the second player who completes their trollmoot that triggers the end of the game. In one of our games, we had a player complete their troll moot two or three rounds before anyone else. They spend all their resources on a big final turn, but then no one else recruited trolls, leaving him destitute for his last 4 turns of the game. If you’re going to hire your last troll, you really don’t want to be very far ahead of the other players, because your ability to acquire resources has just been kneecapped.
The game board has two mountains to choose from, depending on the number of players at the table. The smaller player counts have a smaller map, because the major point of interaction for In the Hall of the Mountain King is the fact that your tunnel network can never connect to another players. There are specific tiles called workshops that can abut tunnels from multiple players, but that’s the extent of it. This does mean on the higher end of the player counts for each map will feel like a much tighter and cutthroat game than the lower end of the player counts. Players have more room to hoover goodies up when there are fewer players to compete with.
I really like that the two halves of the main action propel each other forward. You’re either gathering resources, or spending resources to dig tunnels, and the gathering resources aspect is with brings the game to a close. I do worry about replayability, as the trolls themselves aren’t wildly different, and the game board doesn’t change at all, unless you count changing which entrance you’re starting at and the order of the statues.
What’s really going to informs strategies and create variability in the game are the spells. Before you do anything, you have the ability to spend one of the purple gems to cast a spell, which can have some really lucrative powers. However, after each spell has been used 3 times, it’s exhausted and replaced by another one. These spells are fun to trigger, and clever use of them is certainly going to set you apart from the rest of the pack. There’s probably a criticism to be made here about how some spells are just stronger than others, while others are wildly powerful in very narrow contexts, but I’m not bothered by it, as they’re publicly available to any player on their turn.
I like a clever resource distribution mechanism, and In the Hall of the Mountain King certainly has one, and it’s used to great effect here. Players are given interesting decisions to make and are forced to choose between short term benefits and long term goals. There are multiple strategies to chase here, ensuring repeat plays don’t feel identical. You can dig long, narrow tunnels to cross the mountain, or build big squares to dedicate them into great halls. All the mechanics feed into each other to create a unique and satisfying game that I’m keen to return to.
Disclaimer: This product was sent to me free of charge
Usually when a review game lands on my door, I can trace down where it came from. I don’t have a large media presence, so unsolicited review games are rare, but not unheard of. I debated on even giving this game any oxygen on my website, but halfway through a glass of Bourbon and after two plays of the game, I was feeling a little spicy.
Starting off, the box arrived after, seemingly, been through war. Contained within two bubble wrapped envelopes, every corner of the box was crushed, and there was a hole punched through the back of the box. The text on the back of the box seems as if it was run through Bing translate a few times, and references a sponge that doesn’t exist. The last paragraph is copy/pasted twice. Just, sloppy.
This is every stone provided in the game. No contest.
Inside the box, a plastic baggy holds the string and magnets. The string is simple, yellow. It may as well have been taken off a sneaker. The magnets on the other hand, while they have some slight irregularities in their shape, are smaller than my thumbnail. The instructions were rolled into a tight cylinder, and crammed into the box. Again, the English is awful here. Grammer, typos, referencing the sponge that doesn’t exist, all incredibly poor. For example: “Each player takes turns placing a piece in any groove of the sponge. As you and your opponents take turns in banishment, as theplayers droptheir pieces, there are magnets that are attracted to each other. Youwill then receive the attracted maget piece in your hand,so in the process offalling, you should try.” (typos are not my own).
Thankfully, I already knew of the game that this one was ripping off, Kluster, by Paula and Robert Henning. In Kluster, the magnets are much larger and heavier, with a larger field of attraction. Players divide the magnets between each other and take turns placing their magnet into the rope circle. Should two magnets attract and collide, that player takes them into their hand. The player to empty their hand first wins.
Kluster is a fine game in its own right. It’s a dexterity game that focuses on precision placements, but I find that it lacks some of the tension that I really enjoy in dexterity games, such as the opportunity to make a Hail Mary move that completely swings the final outcome. Instead, what happens most often is when one player places a piece poorly and causes a collision, they may as well just give up at that point because they’re very likely to lose. After all, they have to take all the magnets into their hand, have no opportunity to play more than one during their turn, AND their opponents now have a wide open space to play into. That said, when you place your next magnet, you can slide it against the string to stretch the play area to force some more interaction between players.
Kluster is exciting when the end of the game is nigh, and placing a magnet on the table causes others to wobble ever so slightly. When they collide, the chaos cascades into other magnets in a very exciting way. In Kluster, with the big, chunky magnets, the rocks zoom together with speed and force, crashing, and bouncing across the table, causing more of that chaos. It’s just fun to play. Magnetic on the other hand, with their pea sized magnets, are just so much less effective. They slip together with a tiny click, and that’s the end. All the tension of a limp noodle.
Magnetic is sold on Temu and Amazon for less than $15. This cheap knock off version of the game is not worth your money. It’s listed under a dozen different names, such as Magnetic Chess or Battle Chess, but it’s really not. You cannot trust the pictures on the selling page, as the product you’ll receive is so inferior to Kluster. If any part of what I wrote above sounds appealing to you, pick up Kluster from your friendly local game store. But stay away from Magnetic.
It’s still cool to review games that are almost 20 years old, right? Sweet.
In the Year of the Dragon is an action selection game by designer Stefan Feld, and published by Alea in 2007. Players take on the role of Chinese rulers around the year 1000, and strive to earn the most prestige during a month in which a lot of bad stuff happens.
The gameplay is simple. Each round, the 7 action tiles are shuffled and placed into even-ish groups. Each player in turn order places their dragon at one of those groups and takes an action corresponding with one of those action tiles. If a player wants to go to the same group as a player who went before them, they have to spend 3 Yuan (currency) to the bank for the privilege of doing so. These actions include things like earning money, getting fireworks, building more castles, harvesting rice, and so on.
After everyone has done an action, each player has the chance to hire a single artisan, adding them to one of your palaces. Some of these workers improve your actions in future rounds, others come into effect during the event of each month.
After everyone has hired someone and slotted them into a space in your castle, an event happens. There’s a face up track of 12 events, which also tracks the end of the game. The first two months are peaceful, nothing happens. But after that, famine strikes, which requires you pay a rice token for each castle you own, or release a worker from their service for each rice you’re missing. Some events are a plague that require you to lose 3 workers, but having a healer in your employ will soften that blow. Others like the fireworks show have players compare the number of firework tokens, and awards points to whomever has the majority, then requires the players who earned points to discard half their tokens.
Finally, at the end of every month, some points are scored. At the end of the 12th month, a final scoring takes place, and the player who has the most points is the winner!
Overall, In the Year of the Dragon is a pretty simple game. Setup is quick, with the most tedious aspect being the need to separate out the worker tiles. The rules are easy to learn and teach, and each round of the game is quick and satisfying. It’s fun to try and figure out what’s important to you in each moment, as you might be preparing for the impending famine, or you may be looking ahead to a greater danger.
It’s kind of fascinating to go back and play games that are almost 20 years old to see how games have developed over time. For instance, the idea of losing some of your workers is pretty hard to come by in a more modern game. Most designers are aware of a players’ loss aversion, and avoid explicitly taking things away from a player. A large part of the game is just mitigating the disasters and planning how to eke out a few points in between your disaster preparations. Another thing that feels aged, is that there’s no catch-up mechanisms at all. In fact, it’s often the player who is doing poorly that gets punished even further (like when the invasions happen and the player with the least soldiers loses a worker).
I enjoyed how interactive In the Year of the Dragon is, for a euro game. Players can get in your way, but you can always spend money to do what you wanted to do anyway. Turn order is hugely important, as it ensures you’ll always get the workers you want, and you’ll never be blocked out of any action tiles.
I’m not sure how many different paths to victory there are. In the Year of the Dragon is a very low luck game, and there is no hidden information, which I enjoy. I think a lot of player’s strategy is dictated by the events row, and how players manage to mitigate the bad things that happen. In one of our games, a player used their very first action to purchase a major privilege, which bestows 2 points per round. But then they ended up getting blocked out of the money spot and lost 2 workers to the Dymo’s tribute event. They still won the game, but I was a mere 6 points behind them, and I didn’t buy a single privilege throughout the entire game. In the Year of the Dragon is tightly balanced, and if players don’t make mistakes, then everyone will be separated by single points for most of the game.
Something that really annoyed me was that there is no balancing for being first, second, third, or last. The first players get first picks, and subsequent players cannot make the exact same move as those who precede them. The first player gets first pick of the actions, too. If the first action is to buy a privilege, no other player can follow them, it just seems like a pretty clear advantage.
In the end, In the Year of the Dragon is a simple euro game. It’s fast to teach and play, offers plenty of interesting decisions, and lets players interact with each other in fun ways. It’s not fun to lose some of your staff due to tragedies, but nevertheless, In the Year of the Dragon is a game that I would happily play anytime. I don’t think any subsequent games would feel drastically different, nor are there a myriad of strategies to explore, if exploration is vital to your enjoyment. But it’s still a fun game, and one that I would never shy away from playing.
