I feel like everywhere I look, people are expressing their distress at tha amount of stuff we all have. Our kitchen counters are full of air fryers, coffee machines, and tea kettles, our drawers are overflowing with knickknacks, and our board game shelves are buckling under the weight of triple layered cardboard. People everyone are calling out game boxes that are mostly empty, while praising other games for reducing their footprint on our shelves. Bezier Games looks at this landscape and says, “you know what the people want? Colossal editions”
I know that Colossal Editions are not for me, but I couldn’t help myself when I saw a new in shrink Royal Collectors edition pop up in our local used marketplace. I hemmed and hawed, sold off my copy of Massive Darkness, and used the funds to procure this big fancy box for myself.
Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a 1 to 5 player game, where players are trying to build the best castle. Each round, the Master Builder takes all the tiles available for purchase this round, and sets their prices by placing each one below a spot on the market track. Then in player order to the left of the Master Builder, all players can buy a single tile, handing their money to the Master Builder. The Master Builder themselves gets the final option to buy a tile, but their money goes into the supply.
Players take the tile they purchased, and place it into their castle, adjoining rooms via doorways, and scoring points accordingly. There are 8 different kinds of rooms in a variety of sizes, and each room has different scoring opportunities. Some tiles will give points by being connected via an open door to other specific types of rooms, while activity rooms have a high intrinsic value, but will lose points if they share a wall with other kinds of rooms. You don’t want a bowling alley next to your bedroom after all. Then there’s the basement rooms, which will offer points based on specific types of rooms found throughout your entire castle, adjacency not required.
Rooms are considered complete when all of their doorways are connected to other doorways. When a room is completed, it triggers a special bonus based on the type of room that it is. All players will have secret goals in which they’ll earn points at the end of the game, and there’s some public scoring objectives that are revealed at the start of the game as well. When the deck of room cards runs out, the game is over, and the player with the most points has pleased the Mad King, and I’m sure the others are banished to the dungeons for their failures.
I already knew that I loved The Castles of Mad King Ludwig before I bought the Royal Collectors edition. There’s tension and conflicting decisions all over the place. From the Master Builder setting the price of the tiles, to deciding where to put the rooms into your castle and which bonuses to chase down, I’ve never felt bored when playing this game, but I’ll expound on that later. This new edition gives the game a gorgeous face lift. All the tiles are now vibrant and speckled with art and Easter eggs. I found a couple copies of Suburbia littered amongst the tables in my castle. The look of the game is great, but the functionality isn’t perfect.
Starting with the whole Big Box experience. All the tiles and game pieces are kept in 4 trays at the bottom of the box. Generally, I expect a Game Trayz inclusion to assist in setting up the game, but that’s not the case of Castles of Mad King Ludwig. Instead, you need to lay out the board, slot in these green PVC looking holsters, pull all the tiles of each shape out of the trays, shuffle them up, and count out a certain number of tiles of each shape depending on the player count. I understand why this is necessary, as any stacks of tiles that are depleted at the end of the game are worth extra points, but I hate it. It feels tedious, and then I need to put the trays aside for the rest of the game, as they aren’t needed past the initial set up. Then, all the heaviest pieces, the Kings Favours poker chips, the metal coins, and the player pawns are all in a single tray, making it significantly heavier than the rest of the trays. I cringe as I pull that tray out of the box and feel the plastic bowing under its own weight. It hasn’t failed yet, but I have my concerns.
As for the player pawns, there are 20 colours to choose from. 20! In a 5 player game! Someone can say “I’d like to be blue please” and have 4 slightly different options! Combined with the 20 swans, there are 20 foyers as well. It feels even more excessive and unnecessary. On one hand, hooray for choice. On the other hand, I’m probably never going to play with more than half of these pieces, they were created for nothing.
My own production qualms aside, the gameplay of The Castles of Mad King Ludwig remains largely unchanged from its original debut 10 years ago. Each round a number of tiles comes out, the Master Builder chooses the price for each tile, then all other players get a chance to buy. I love this phase, the master builder has to balance making the best tiles expensive, but not unreasonably so. The other players similarly need to choose between giving the master builder all their money and taking the tile they want. The ‘I split-you choose’ bidding mechanism is great for creating delicious decisions.
Then building your castle is its own bundle of trade-offs. Rooms want to be adjacent to certain other rooms, but not adjacent to some. Sometimes you’ll really want to complete a room to earn its completion bonus, but the only tile available to you that round does nothing to help your score. I love building the castles, and seeing how sometimes they sprawl horizontally, and other times they seem to twist in on themselves, creating a crowded and hilarious castle.
The Royal Collectors edition also came with a couple of expansions, namely the Moats, Swans, Secret Entrances, Towers, and Royal Decrees. Each one is a small addition to the game. None of which are overwhelming, but each one being a separate entity that you need to teach. Most of them you could include with new players, but some, such as the Secret Entrances, I would leave out just because they can be quite influential if played right.
It’s hard to say much more about The Castles of Mad King Ludwig, because the summary of my experience is “it’s good! Real good!”. Years ago, I picked up Ted Alspach’s other game Suburbia, and felt like it was the better design. As time has gone on, however, I find myself much more inclined to return to the Mad King’s Castles. The dynamic market feels much more interactive, and I always find looking at each player’s castle a delight at the end of the game. There’s a whimsy here that Suburbia is missing. Not to say that Suburbia is a bad game by any stretch, heck no. But my appreciation for The Castles of Mad King Ludwig has grown over time, while Suburbia has stayed consistent. I love this game, and would play it at any opportunity. Yes, the Royal Collectors Edition has some missteps with the production, and I did read some people being displeased about a new expansion being announced before this “complete version” of the game was even delivered. That doesn’t bother me, I don’t need expansions to this game. I’m so happy every time this hits the table, and I get to play in my little sandbox building a glorious castle.
