I’m a pretty antisocial kind of guy, which is not exactly conducive to building a community. I’m the perpetual lurker: always reading, always watching, rarely commenting. I show up to public events and hover near the wall, sticking close to the people I already know, not really engaging in the way I’d perhaps like to. But when I saw that a local board game café was hosting a launch party for a local designer’s newly published game, I decided it was my civic duty to show up and support a local success story. After all, if I ever designed and published a board game, I’d hope my local community would come out to support it. The launch party even just so happened to fall on my regularly scheduled board game night, so I convinced my friends to make the trip out to the café, and we sat down with Tatsumi, designed by Jeremy Rozenhart and published by Adam’s Apple Games in 2026.
In Tatsumi, each player is a Tatsu, a guardian dragon, trying to collect elemental rings from a 5 by 5 grid of ocean wells, and offer them to shrines in order to cover their island and score the most points. The turn structure is wonderfully simple. Every turn you’ll do two things, and one of those things must be movement. To move, you simply fly in one direction as far as you want. Dragons block each other, so you can’t simply hop over someone or push them out of the way to land on their space, but otherwise movement feels very open and free. Whenever you leave a space, you collect the ring from the well you were standing on and add it to your holding area. Your second action is either gathering or offering. Gathering lets you collect additional rings from the spaces near your dragon, and in the asymmetric version of the game every dragon gathers differently. Offering on the other hand lets you cash in the rings you’ve collected at altars around the edges of the board, which will see you placing rings onto your personal island and scoring points based on the number of elemental rifts you’ve managed to cover.
I really appreciate is how clean and flexible the whole game feels. Each turn you must move, then do one of the other two actions, but you can do them in any order. You can choose to gather and then move, setting yourself up for an offer next round, or offer and then move or move and offer, you get the picture. Tatsumi gives you just enough freedom that every turn feels like you’re trying to untangle a logistical knot in the most efficient way possible. The altars themselves are also a neat little pressure point. On one side they ask for three rings of the same colour and reward you by letting you place one of your scales onto the associated blessing tile that might give you a persistent ability, a burst of points, or some other perk. Then the altar flips over and suddenly wants a totally different set of coloured rings, with no blessing perk for that offering. It creates this nice tempo where you’re constantly weighing whether now is the right time to cash in or if you can afford to wait one more turn before the other players change the altars requirements out from under you.
The scoring system also pulls you in different directions simultaneously. Your first ring needs to be placed along the edge of the board, and every subsequent ring must be placed adjacent to an existing ring. Every ring you place scores you points equal to the number of elemental rifts that you’ve managed to cover. But those rifts are scattered along the edges of your board, making you really reach to cover all of them to start raking in 4 points per ring of that colour placed. This mechanism gives Tatsumi a really great sense of progression, with the points you’re netting at the end of the game absolutely dwarfing the points you were earning at the start.
Adding to the spatial puzzle of Tatsumi, the coloured rings have their own endgame scorings. Your largest contiguous section of blue rings will net you two points per ring in that group. The yellows are kind of the opposite, where each group of yellow rings nets you 2 points, no matter their size. The blacks want to be adjacent to all the colours, as each black ring scores one point for every different colour next to them, and the red rings just want to be together, scoring 5 points for each group of 3 rings or more. These requirements will have you weighing your short term benefits of covering things on your island for potentially more points down the road, with ruining some of your carefully laid end game scoring plans. The way Tatsumi pulls your brain in two is simply delightful.
I’ve always adored tactical puzzle games. If you’ve been around my blog for a while, I’ve already covered games like Azul, Sagrada, Harmonies, Cascadia, Calico, or Akropolis. And Tatsumi stands alongside this incredible line up. It’s easy to teach, easy to understand, but capable of producing that really satisfying brain burn of “okay but if I move here first, or maybe I should do this instead…” that makes tactical puzzle games so gratifying to play. It’s the kind of game where you don’t have to take it seriously, and you’ll have a pleasant time, but if you’re trying to optimize every point, it really starts to be taxing on the brain in a really great way.
I also really need to talk about the production because it’s genuinely novel. The dragons sit on these ocean wells: a plastic tray holding stacks of rings in a five-by-five grid. As you move around the board you’re hoovering up rings from the wells, and once a well runs dry, you drop in a little sand dollar token to mark it empty. You can still land there, you just won’t collect anything when you leave. The tray itself is kind of genius. I can only imagine how fiddly this game would have been if you had to constantly refill spaces from a bag or manually build stacks during setup. Instead, at the end of the game you basically set the plastic tray in the bottom of the box and just chuck all the rings into the tray, and they just naturally settle into place. It’s one of those production decisions that solves a problem you didn’t even realize would have annoyed you.
The rings themselves are also delightfully tactile. Gathering them feels good in a very simple, toy-like way. You just dip the tip of your fingers into the wells and pull it out effortlessly. This is like the opposite of when you’re trying to pick up a card, but you can’t get your fingernail between the card and the table. There’s also something deeply reminiscent about moving rings from the board into your holding area and then onto your island adjacent to already placed rings. That aspect actually reminds me of The Castles of Burgundy, actually.
I do have some gripes, of course. Sometimes it was difficult to see what the altar on the opposite side of the table required because the ocean board itself obscured the view a little. Black rings sitting alone in wells could also awkward to spot depending on the lighting and your angle at the table, making you think a well was empty while planning your turn. I didn’t feel like the rulebook was especially laid out well, either, which made it harder than it should have been to find some edge-case clarifications during play. Thankfully for us, the designer was right there for us to ask him questions. One specific example of the rulebook failing involved the blessing cards. The phrase in the book said to shuffle them all together, but the intent was that one blessing of each of the 4 types would be used in each game. None of these complaints were game-breaking problems by any means, but they were the sort of little friction points that stood out, because the rest of the experience was so smooth.
Still, Tatsumi made an immediate positive impression on me. The asymmetry from the dragons, islands, and blessings adds enough variety to make repeat plays interesting without overcomplicating the core puzzle, and the game is just genuinely satisfying to interact with from moment to moment. We were hooked almost immediately.
Honestly though, I think the best endorsement of Tatsumi happened after the games were over. As tables started finishing up at the café, people immediately began crowding around the designer asking if they could buy one of his copies right there on the spot. Not preorder it. Not wishlist it. Buy it to take it home right then and there.
And really, I think that speaks more praise than any review can.
I don’t know what’s changed about me lately, but I often found myself preferring the shorter card games instead of the big, heavy, rules-dense board games that used to dominate my life. Maybe it’s just the phase of life I’m in, the fatigue that comes with raising young children, or maybe I’ve finally accepted that not every game needs to be prefaced by an hour of studying the rulebook to feel like time well spend. So when Hungry Monkey, designed by Erik Andersson Sundén and published by HeidelBÄR Games in 2022, came out during a pub night with friends, I was intrigued. Another small-box card game? Can’t wait to find out more!
The core of Hungry Monkey is simple enough. To start the game, each player gets a hand of 3 cards, and a row of 4 cards face down in front of them. On your turn you play any number of identical cards from your hand or play the top card from the draw pile onto the animal pile. The card you play must be valid, that is to say, the value of the card played must be equal or higher than the top card on the animal pile. If the card played is invalid for any reason, you then must pick up the whole animal pile and add it to your hand. If after playing a valid card, there are 4 or more identical cards on top of the animal pile, then the whole animal pile is removed from the game. In addition, several of the animals you can play have some special effects. The ant, for instance, is always valid, but playing it makes you pick up the whole animal deck under the ant. The snake lets you look at a face down card of any player, while the buffalo forces the next player to play a card lower than the buffalo. The King Tiger discards the entire animal pile. At the end of your turn you need to draw your hand back up to 3, unless the draw pile is empty.
Once the draw pile is empty, and you manage to play all the cards from your hand, you can start playing the cards from your face down row. Once both your hand and your face down row have been exhausted, you win the game!
What I like about Hungry Monkey is the presentation. The art by Sushrita Bhattacharjee is genuinely charming. Each animal has a distinct personality, and the style has a charming, playful quality that helps it to stand out.
But the gameplay of Hungry Monkey itself feels very random. Your options on your turn are limited. With only three cards in hand, you’re often stuck between a rock and a hard place if you have the wrong numbers in your hand. That restriction doesn’t translate into meaningful decisions so much as it creates a sense that you’re just along for the ride. Playing an invalid card will make you pick up the whole pile and make your hand swell. Sure, that will give you more options in the future, but because at the end of every turn, you need to draw back up to 3 until the deck runs out anyway, it makes the majority of the game feel somewhat irrelevant. You’re spending your time just kind of posturing your card row until that draw deck runs out and then hoping for some advantageous situations in the final few turns.
There are moments of excitement, to be fair. Little bursts of chaos when someone flips the perfect card off the deck, or frustration when another player jumps half the numbers and plays a card exactly one higher than the highest card in your hand. It creates that light, social friction that works really well in a pub setting. There are some laughs, some mock betrayal, the occasional groan. In that environment, Hungry Monkey makes sense. It’s easy, it’s quick, and it doesn’t demand much from any of the players.
There is also a bean-scoring system that carries points across multiple games, encouraging you to play several games in a row to see who the ultimate winner is. In theory, that adds some longevity to this simple and quick card game. But in reality, I don’t really want to play multiple Hungry Monkey multiple times in a row. The interactions and strategies just aren’t interesting enough to sustain that kind of repetition, and the randomness makes it hard for me to feel invested in any one game, let alone a series of them.
I keep coming back to the same thought when thinking about Hungry Monkey. What’s the point of most of the game? If the early and mid-game decisions don’t meaningfully shape the outcome, and everything hinges on a handful of late-game turns, why not just skip ahead? Why not just top-deck until your choices start to matter? And that’s really not a great question to be asking about a game.
I don’t hate Hungry Monkey. If it comes out, I’ll play it. It’s harmless, quick, and occasionally amusing. But I’m also probably not going to request it, and it’s certainly not a game I’d request to play. There are a lot of games that fit into this space, the ones that play well in a pub like No Thanks or 6 Nimmt, or Don’t L.L.A.M.A. Small, portable, easy-to-teach card games, and all of them offer more interesting decisions, with fewer rules. Which can really matter when you’re trying to explain how a game works while speaking over a crowd of people and wrestling their attention away from the Habs game on the pub’s TVs.
For me, Hungry Monkey didn’t quite stick. It seems like the perfect game to play at the pub, but even having a great setting couldn’t make this game shine.
I think one of the byproducts of growing up in a town that was basically 2 km long and half a kilometre wide is that I never really developed a need for a car until I was in my early twenties. And as a result of not having a car for the entire first half of my life, I’m just… not really a car guy. I don’t seem to have that stereotypical urge to fix an engine, and I couldn’t care less about the intricacies of the Daytona 500. Watching a whole bunch of cars turn left all day has never exactly called to me.
But I do love the bicycle racing board game Flamme Rouge, and when the designers of that (Asger Aleksandrov Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen) came out with another racing game, I couldn’t help but be intrigued. Although, I found myself predisposed to disliking Heat. Upon its launch it immediately got a bunch of critical acclaim, and I felt weirdly betrayed. How dare the community move on from Flamme Rouge so easily, and for a game about grotesque cars!? How inelegant! My monocle nearly popped off my eye at the mere thought of it.
But, I never let my biases prevent me from giving a game it’s proper due. If I’m going to dislike a game, I feel I should at least play it, so I can have an educated opinion, rather than one rooted in assumptions and hearsay.
Bowl of candy not included
At its core, Heat is a racing game. I want to call it a deck builder, but that’s not quite right. All players will start with the same base deck, you’ll draft some equipment cards to add a bit of asymmetrical flare, and during the game, heat cards will enter and exit your deck. Not really a deck building game, but it has a deck building vibe. Each round starts with all players drawing up to 7 cards, and then playing cards equal to your current gear. You can always play one more or one less than your gear to ‘shift’ for free, or you can jump a gear by moving a heat card from your engine into your discard pile. I’ll get back to what heat means in just a moment. All players pick their cards for the round, then you slide into the movement phase.
The cards you play from your hand, will each generally have a value from 1 to 4. At the start of the movement phase, the player in first position moves the number equal to the value of the cards they played. You can move a heat into your discard to ‘boost’, which has you just drawing the next card off the top of your deck and move that number of spaces. Then the next player goes, but if they happen to end their turn directly behind someone, they can slipstream, moving two bonus spaces, in a great catch up mechanism that does wonders for keeping all players in the race.
On the subject of movement, the course you’re racing on will have corners, and those corners will have limits. You can safely pass the corners by only moving the described number of spaces on your turn. For every square you move beyond that limit, you’ll need to move a heat from your engine to your discard pile. If you ever need to move a heat, but can’t, then you ‘spin out’, making you reset back to the square just before the turn you spun out on.
So let’s talk about the titular heat resource. It’s actually kind of amazing. At the start of the game each player will have 6 heat cards in the centre of their player board. Whenever you need to ‘pay a heat’, you’ll move one of those heat cards from your engine into your discard pile. Those cards will eventually get shuffled and drawn into your hand, where they will clog up your deck until you ‘cool’ them, which simply removes them from your hand and puts them back into your engine.
Clogging up your hand is no joke. Having more cards to choose from when you’re trying to thread the needle between players and nail a specific corner is paramount. But heat isn’t just a dead card, but it represents a moment where you push your car beyond its safe limits to gain an important edge. Taking those limiting corners just a bit faster than everyone else, boosting on a straight away to exceed your gear capacity, it’s all things you need to take into consideration if you’re hoping to win.
Of course, what really makes Heat: Pedal to the Metal great, is the tension that arises from the stress cards. Instead of numbers, these cards have a + symbol, which when resolved, just has you flip over cards from your deck until you pull one of your base speed cards, then move the number on that card. It’s a bit of uncertainty, a touch of risk. The stress cards cannot be discarded, either, they must be played at some point. If you hold them for too long, you’ll clog up your hand, removing those precious options from yourself. But also you need to negotiate with yourself, how much are you willing to risk? If you play a stress card and pull the 4, you’ll go over the corner and spin out. But you probably won’t draw a 4. Right?
Because the game is not entirely deterministic, it creates excellent moments of tension. Moments when you need anything other than a 4, and you’ll end your turn right before the turn, but then you flip the card and then bam. There’s the 4. Alternatively, when you come out of a turn onto a massive straightaway, you spend the heat to jump from 2nd to 4th gear, and play all your stress cards and flip over a series of 1’s and 2’s. I don’t know what the motorsport equivalent of a wet fart is, but I feel that in my soul.
Conversely to those bad examples, I recently played a game where on the final stretch I played 2 stress cards and boosted on my final turn, and all 3 of those random card draws pulled a 4, leaving me 2 spaces ahead and winning the game. It was dramatic and exciting, the kind of moment that makes everyone stand up and shout, not believing that you managed to pull off a crazy come back. The game system is chaotic in a way that creates moments that you’ll remember, long after the box has been put away.
As I said before, I was weirdly determined to dislike Heat when it first came out. It was getting all kinds of praise, and in my head I was like, “But I already have Flamme Rouge, how dare you suggest something might be better?” No one was actually saying that, but enough people were comparing them that I got defensive. Add to that the fact that I don’t really care about car racing as a theme, and yeah, I went in skeptical. But Heat has completely won me over.
There’s a real sense of tension throughout the race, those moments where you play a stress card and hold your breath as you flip, hoping for exactly what you need, and then you miraculously get it. Slipstreaming gives trailing players a chance to catch up, so even if someone manages to break away, it never feels like the race is over. You can still find a clever line, tuck in behind at just the right moment, and surge forward in a way that makes you feel like a savant. It’s the kind of game that gets people standing up, shouting, reacting to every reveal. It captures that feeling of pushing a machine to its limit and threading the needle just right.
I do think there are some balance quirks with the equipment cards you draft at the start. You take six of them, and the draft order snakes so that it should balance out among equally skilled players. But in my early plays, there were definitely moments where someone who understood the game better just crushed me, and it wasn’t entirely clear how much the cards contributed to that. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s something I noticed.
What is worth noting is how expandable this game feels. Different tracks, more varied turns, weather conditions and more, it all fits so naturally into what the game is already doing. There are already 2 big box expansions out there, with more on the way.
That said, the setup can be a bit of a chore. There’s a lot going on with boards, decks, and modules that it makes me not want to commit to doing the full championship mode at the table. I don’t necessarily feel like racing multiple maps back to back creates a more interesting experience. As a one-off race, though? Heat is fantastic.
Heat: Pedal to the Metal surprised me. It took a theme I don’t care about and turned it into something tense, exciting, and just plain fun to experience. It’s one of those rare games that can pull people out of their seats, make them laugh at their own misfortune, and cheer when things go exactly right. And for someone who couldn’t care less about cars, that’s saying something.
Playing through Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Final Fantasy IX back-to-back really drives home just how much of a turning point the PlayStation era was for the series. The series moved on from being so iterative and really started getting experimental in big, albeit sometimes messy ways. I’m not sure if there were too many cooks in the kitchen, but one thing for sure is that kitchen got a lot bigger. These 3 games feel like they come from larger teams with bigger ambitions, each one trying to push the franchise in a new direction, rather than just refine or tweak what came before.
Final Fantasy VII is the obvious line in the sand. Moving from the SNES’s 2D plane into fully 3D character models layered over pre-rendered backgrounds is such a generational leap that it’s almost hard to recognize how dramatic the shift was back in 1997. And then you add in the shift to a disc-based system, which suddenly gave the developers room to tell a much grander, more cinematic story. That dramatic generation shift carries forward into Final Fantasy VIII, where the character models lean toward the more realistic proportions. And the way it blends those gameplay models into the full-motion prerendered cutscenes goes from “pretty neat” in VII to really technically impressive in VIII and IX. In fact, by the time you get to IX, it often feels so seamless that I don’t realize that I’m in a cutscene until it slowly takes my control away from the character. That’s to say nothing about the cinematic CG cutscenes in IX. You can certainly tell Square was getting really good at making CG movies at this point. And pair all that with the music which, never once falters across the whole series, and the whole presentation just rockets these games so far beyond what the NES and SNES entries accomplished visually and emotionally. Those earlier games still told great stories and built strong character connections, but this is where the series starts flexing in a completely different way.
What stands out just as much, though, is how willing these games are to tear up their own series conventions. The battle system changed in Final Fantasy IV to the ATB, and that ATB persists into Final Fantasy IX, but the magic system in this trilogy of games gets broken down to bits and rebuilt twice. For the past 6 games you needed to have a mage class in your party if you wanted to cast spells (Except in Final Fantasy II, but we don’t talk about that one much). But the materia system in VII suddenly enables anyone in your party to run a black mage build. Or heck, your strongest melee fighter can have a couple spells to fall back on when the situation calls for it. Then the magic gets reworked entirely again in VIII with the junction system which while I have my criticisms, I can see why some people love that system. It’s as they say, reasonable people can come to different conclusions. Perhaps that’s one of the trade-offs with this era: you can’t just slip back into the old familiar rhythms anymore. Every new Final Fantasy asks you to relearn how it works, and while that keeps the series from going stale, it also makes each entry a bit divisive. If you gel with the system, it becomes a new favourite. If you chafe against it, you call the game garbage.
Something I didn’t fully appreciate before playing through these games is just how influential the Final Fantasy series was on the JRPGs that came after. You can see ideas, themes, and even mechanical DNA from VII, VIII, and IX echoing into other franchises that I already know I love, like the Tales Of series. It’s easy to look back now and poke at the jank or criticize the systems that NOW feel dated, especially when later games iterate on and improve those ideas. But it’s important to remember that when these games originally came out, they were trailblazers. While other franchises were content to slightly iterate on their previous games to be consistent and familiar, Final Fantasy was out there challenging what it even means to be called a JRPG anymore.
And yet, for all that, I keep circling back my personal ranking of these games. I still prefer the SNES trilogy of games. IV, V, and VI have aged much more gracefully, at least for me. Part of that is probably timing, as they came out at the end of the SNES lifecycle and really pushed that hardware to its limits. The people making the games at the time were already experts in pixel art and creating interesting 2D locations and set pieces. Compare that to the PlayStation games, where making games in 3D was still in its infancy, and you can feel the growing pains. The way the textures are stretched and warped on awkward 3D models, it just isn’t good to look at in this day and age. The PS1 Final Fantasy games are absolutely ambitious in ways that are commendable, but innovation doesn’t always equal timelessness. Final Fantasy VII’s overworld models are laughably simple, they look they could be made of clay or cardboard. And sometimes navigating those pre-rendered backgrounds was confusing in ways I don’t think were intentional. 4
Now, I haven’t played the Final Fantasy VII Remake, I’ve just seen screenshots and a few clips here and there, and it looks incredible. But it does make me wonder whether all three of these games need that kind of treatment. Do they all deserve to be rebuilt with modern sensibilities now that we understand 3D design so much better, or is it okay for them to exist as artifacts of their time? They may not hold up as cleanly as some other classics, but their impact is undeniable. And there’s something to be said for leaving history intact, rough edges and all.
From here, I’m heading into the last stretch of this little project: Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII. X is a weird one for me, I made it all the way to the final boss when I played it on my PS2 back in 2005, but never actually managed to finish the game off. And now that it’s been so long, I struggle to remember anything other than the very main story bits (and that laughing scene). XII is even stranger; I’ve played the first half of the game at least three separate times on different systems and never committed to seeing it through. Honestly, those unfinished games was a large part of my inspiration for embarking on this journey in the first place.
After that, I honestly don’t know what comes next. Maybe I’ll keep going with the numbered entries, the XIII trilogy, the XV multimedia juggernaut, and XVI, which I know shocking little about. Or maybe I spend some time detouring into the side stories like Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Or maybe I pivot to an entirely different franchise, and finally give the Tales Of series the full play through it probably deserves.
Whatever direction I end up going, I have a feeling I’ll keep writing about it. At this point, that’s kind of half the fun.
I’m Canadian, so any jokes about White Castle as a fast food chain are pretty lost on me. Although, thanks to Harold and Kumar, the references are not completely lost in translation. The White Castle, in my context, is a die drafting game designed by Sheila Santos and Israel Cendrero, and published by Devir in 2023. In The White Castle, players control clans as they vie for victory points by amassing influence in the court, managing their resources wisely, and by having a veritable army of staff amongst the bridges and walls of the Himeji stronghold.
The White Castle, has players trying to advance the standing of their clan with the daimyo of Himeji Castle in feudal Japan. And right out of the gate, I felt intrigued. Dice drafting/worker placement? Yes! Tight resource and a penchant for combos? Yes please! Feudal Japanese theme? Sounds like my kind of game!
I’ve mostly played The White Castle on Board Game Arena, and I’ll admit that my first play didn’t leave me with the best first impression. Thankfully, I joined a casual tournament, which meant I was locked in to play at least 6 games. And once I started diving into the game, the more meat and depth I found to plunder. I didn’t realize it at first, because I was playing asynchronously, but the game only lasts 9 turns.
I feel the need to say that again. The entire game lasts for 9. Turns.
But despite its abbreviated length, The White Castle is full of combos. Every time you play, you have the urge to try again to see just how much more value you can squeeze out of those 9 turns.
9 turns spread over 3 rounds. At the start of each round, you roll the all the dice and arrange them on the bridges in ascending numerical value. On your turn, you simply take one die that’s on either end of the cardboard bridge, and do something with it. The main board has an ever-changing pyramid of actions, and your personal board has some actions that will slowly get more and more valuable as you start to spread your meeples throughout the court.
Immediately, there’s some consideration on which side of the bridge to take the dice from. Every action has a cost printed on the board, and the difference between the printed cost and the die you place to take the action will either cost you or earn you money. So obviously you want to take from the right side to earn that cash, right? Well, taking from the left side will earn you your lantern rewards, which will shower a bevy of benefits as you slot more and more cards onto your player board. But you’ll likely need to pay a couple coins for that privilege.
The actions themselves are pretty standard Euro stuff. Earning resources, coins, and influence, but the way the actions can chain together is where the game starts to hum. Each player has a staff to manage, including gardeners, warriors, and courtiers. Each offer benefits for placing them out, and are linked to each other in subtle ways.
The courtier action will have you paying pearls to send your meeples to the castle, and ascend up the social hierarchy. Each spot they land on in the action card pyramid, they take that action card and drop it onto your player board, pushing the card that was on your board down to your lantern bonus slot. This lets you have an action card all to yourself, potentially robbing your opponents of its abilities.
I don’t want to just skip over those Lantern rewards, as they can be incredibly valuable. Each subsequent card you add to that row improves the resources you get every time you trigger the lantern bonus. It’s vaguely engine-building, but again, with only 9 turns, you’ll be limited in how many times you’re able to add cards to that row, and how many times you can goose your engine. But it is truly satisfying when you start the game getting a single coin as a benefit to getting 4 or 5 rewards from taking a lower value die. Even better when the dice on the bridge happen to be all 5’s.
The warriors require iron to be placed, but will give you a random benefit that is established at the start of the game. Sometimes you can turn their benefit into a profit, making it feel like the game is paying you for putting them out, while other games the benefit won’t match the cost. At the end of the game however, the warriors earn victory points based directly on how many courtiers you managed to sneak into the castle.
The gardeners live near the bridges, and getting them out early can feel key, as between each round they’ll trigger some income for you. But only after rounds 3 and 6. After that they’ll give you a meagre amount of points at the end of the game, but they seem to exist as a trap for players who don’t realize just how quickly these turns can fly by.
Some turns are quick and simple. But others will let you combo 2 or 3 actions or benefits together. That cadence of “I do this, which gets me this, which triggers this to earn me that” feels fantastic. You line something up, trigger a main action, which gives you another action, which triggers a Lantern reward, which nudges you into something else… and suddenly you’re able to accomplish so much more in those 9 turns than you ever thought possible.
Of course, that tightness does hamper you, too. The game is restrictive. Dice spots fill up fast (in 3 and 4 player games you can stack die on top of each other, making the action slots a bit less tight, although the coin costs will swing wildly), resources are often scarce, and sometimes you’re staring at your options thinking, “What can I even do with this?” The Well action exists as a bailout, but going there feels a lot like a wasted action, and when you only have nine turns, that’s a significant cost.
That tension is what makes it interesting, though. Every decision matters, and I’ve definitely felt my approach shift over multiple plays. Early on, I was so focused on getting my gardeners out in the first round to maximize their value. Now I know that I have to come out swinging. Every turn is precious, and if I’m not doing something meaningful right away, I’m already behind.
There’s also some hidden interaction at the bridges. I said before that the gardeners will earn you income after rounds 3 and 6, but they only do so if there’s at least one die on that bridge. More than once I saw someone stacking up their gardeners on a specific bridge, so I drained it of dice, leaving their workers out to dry. More often than not you won’t be specifically targeting denying someone’s income, but it’s just one more lever to pull, one more consideration when you’re trying to decide between two die. Something you always need to keep in mind.
I particularly appreciate how variable the set-up is. The action cards are all different for every game, and which colours of die trigger which ability is all random. Every game is a new puzzle to interact with. That said, all the changing information can lead to analysis paralysis. If you or your play partners are prone to that, you’ll feel it. Especially when someone snipes the action card you were counting on, so you need to reconsider your entire strategy over again.
All that said, I’ve had a blast with The White Castle. The combos, the tension, the variability from the dice and card setup, it all comes together in a way that makes each game feel just a little different. The dice rolls alone can completely change how a round plays out, and the shifting card availability in the castle keeps you on your toes.
It feels very short. I don’t know if I mentioned this yet, but it’s only 9 turns long. I’m often left with a feeling that if only I had just one more turn, I could have really achieved everything I set out to do. Except for maxing out that passage of time track, I have no idea how someone could manage to get to the end of that.
