It’s 15th century France, the Loire valley. As influential nobles, you do your best to lead your duchies to prosperity through careful trade and – stop. Let’s be real. No one actually cares about the theme of a game that’s as generic and overplayed as The Castles of Burgundy, right? How does the theme relate to the mechanics of the game? What do the dice even represent? None of that really matters. What you’re here for is to see if the dice game version of The Castles of Burgundy is fun to play or not, right?
In my The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Gamereview, I mentioned that I was hoping that it would be a distillation of the main game, streamlined and slimmed down to a smaller box, faster play time, and hopefully retain that Castles of Burgundy feel. I was disappointed with the card game product, but I’m back to take another stab at the apple, and see if the dice game is what I was actually searching for.
The Castles of Burgundy: The Dice Game, designed by Stefan Feld and Christoph Toussaint, comes in a very small box, about the size of a paperback book. Inside are 5 pencils, 5 dice, and a book of 100 player sheets, all double-sided. There are about 50 copies of each of the 4 different duchies for variability, and that’s it. To play, all players are given a single sheet, and a pencil. While the components in the box limit the number of players, there’s no reason you couldn’t play with as many people as you can find pencils for.
Two of the dice have colours on each face. Two of the dice have the normal 1–6 numbers, and the remaining dice has 1 or 2 hourglass symbols. Gameplay is just have one person roll all 5 dice, mark off the number of hour glasses on the time track in the top right corner, then choose a pairing of dice to fill in on your player sheet. One colour and one number. All the different provinces in your duchy have different requirements. The purple monastery hexes require a 1 or a 2. The Mines need a 3 or a 4, and the shipyards need a 5 or a 6. The green castles need to have the same number as an adjacent tile, the yellow animal tiles all must be the same number within a single province, and the orange city province must have all different numbers. When you complete a province, you’ll earn points based on the ‘era’, plus points based on the size of the province. Furthermore, once you complete a province, you’ll unlock a benefit that you can use later. Be it a worker that allows you to change the number dice to any number you want, a monk who does the same thing, but for the colour dice. A silverling that allows you to take a second pairing of dice, or goods you can ship for more silver and points.
Roll the dice, pick one pair of dice, and colour and a number, mark it on your sheet, and roll again. Continue following this pattern until all 3 ‘era’s’ are complete, and the player with the most points is the winner. The only bit of interaction between players comes in the form of completing all the hexes of a single colour to earn a small amount of bonus points. Beyond that, it’s a heads down, solitaire experience where you’re just trying to amass the most points, with nothing but the dice to get in your way.
If the goal was to have a shorter Castles of Burgundy experience, I think The Dice Game nails it. It plays start to finish in about 15 minutes, max. With a maximum of 10 and minimum of 5 dice rolls per era, this whole game exists within 15 to 30 actions. Sometimes you’ll start the game with nothing to do, as the colours and numbers rolled just don’t exist next to your starting tile. Not much to do but take a worker, then move onto the next round.
I don’t play many roll & write games, so I can’t really compare this game against others that share the mechanism. I do know one of the things I look forward to in these types of games is triggering cascading combos, and that doesn’t happen here. Players are restricted to only using one bonus on their turn, so the most you can do is “mark off this one, which completes this province to get points and this bonus, and I’ll use this bonus to take another pair, which marks off this one over here, which completes that province for points and a bonus”. That’s it, that’s the biggest turn that will happen in this game. Maybe if both of those province completions also trigger the “first to complete all of a colour” reward as well, but that’s surely an edge case scenario.
My biggest complaint with The Castles of Burgundy: The Dice Game is easily the graphic design. The player sheets are incredibly small, and there’s a lot of information packed onto each sheet. That itself doesn’t bother me, but the darker background and use of pencils feels like a major oversight. In theory, you’re supposed to circle a benefit when you earn it, then cross it out when it’s used, but the pencil lead blends in with the black circles, making it real hard to see at a glance what you actually have. More than once I passed whole turns, thinking I had no options, only to realize later that I actually had 2 workers waiting in the wings. Bigger sheets and white circles would have helped this problem massively.
That said, it is a fun little dice game. It’s a quick little puzzle that you can bang out during a quiet morning, or at any table in between activities. Playing with more players doesn’t increase the play time, but it also barely increases the tension. More players are competing for those “first” rewards, but at the end of the day, the only thing you’re competing against is your own score.
The Castles of Burgundy: The Dice Game won’t replace the full game anytime soon, but it’s a cute little distraction that I was happy to pick up. I enjoyed this much more than The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game, but it’s not a game that I’ll be pushing to play with anyone and everyone.
I was so excited when The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game was announced. It was fairly early on in my board game hobby, and I was seriously in love with the original The Castles of Burgundy. I was expecting a bite-sized version of the popular board game, Something that could travel with me and I could play in a fraction of the time. Not to spoil the review, but it felt more like they tried to stuff an elephant into a clown car.
The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game has no dice, no tiles, no boards, just cards. And more cards. And surprise surprise, even more cards. Some folks claim that CoB:TCG keeps the setting of the original Castles of Burgundy, but tosses everything else out the window, but it’s got plenty of parallels with the full game than you might think. You still snag farms, buildings, boats, castles, and “knowledge” cards from dice based locations, then you need to move those cards onto your estate. Your actions are tied to die results on the cards, and you can throw in some workers to modify your card flip dice pip result, and even the silver coins make a comeback. See? Plenty of shared history between these games.
That said, there are plenty of differences. No player boards, no completing regions, and it’s all about building sets of three cards of the same colour to rack up points. Boats got a 4-point symbol? Well, you’re not scoring 4 points when you build one; you’re scoring 4 points when you build three. Wanna score those 4 points again? Start another set of three. And those yellow knowledge cards that in the base game give you special powers and/or endgame victory points? Here they’re all the same, just two workers, no fancy variety. Plus, you’re getting one action per turn, unless you fork over silver or a card gives you an extra action. The ability to combo is much more restricted than the original game.
What’s to like about this card game? Well, for starters, it comes in a small box. And that’s about it.
Now, what’s not to like? I was hoping for a streamlined, quick card game, perfect for taking on trips, playing on tiny tables, while retaining the feel of the game that I loved so much. Nope, this game tried to do everything the original game did, except instead of using better and intuitive components like dice, they’ve proxied dice rolls with a card deck instead. And The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game is a table hog. You’ll end up with dozens of piles of cards all over the table, sometimes I feel like this game takes up even MORE space than the full board game. It’s chaos and I don’t like it.
It’s fairly simple to learn how to play The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game if you know how to play The Castles of Burgundy. But I tried teaching my mom how to play, and she nearly went cross-eyed. We ended up scrapping that game, as it was just too many little things all over the place, and the card form factor didn’t facilitate any kind of learning. While I don’t think there are many people who will be jumping right into this version of the Burgundy-verse, it’s worth noting that having the background knowledge of the base game feels required to on-ramp players into this game.
In the original version, the point salad scoring system forced players to trade off short term gains for long term plans, and players who could exploit their provinces and player powers could catapult themselves into the stratosphere in terms of points. In The Card Game, points come from completing sets of 3, selling goods, and collecting animals. There’s no interesting trade-offs, no oomph or zest in the scoring system to separate the wheat from the chaff. It’s toothless.
I gave The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game a few tries, and every time I was felt like I should have just played the original. It takes about the same amount of time and table space, but offers a much more compelling experience. I love The Castles of Burgundy, but this card game version? It’s like the bland, no name product version of the game. The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game It’s an example of how to turn something interesting into a bland and forgettable experience. Skip this and go play the original.
At this point, trying to review a game like 2011’s The Castles of Burgundy is kind of like trying to review a Toyota Corolla, or a pizza. Everyone already has their own experience and opinions have already been formed. The Castles of Burgundy is a staple of the board game hobby, and it often comes up as the best ‘next step’ game for players who are ready to graduate their tabletop games into something a bit deeper and more complex.
Playing The Castles of Burgundy is simple enough. Each turn, all players roll both their dice, then in player order, they use both their dice to complete actions, such as taking a tile from the centre board into your personal supply, placing a tile from your supply onto your personal board, getting 2 workers (which will allow you to modify your dice), or shipping goods that you’ve collected for some points and silver.
The crux of the game is the pips of the dice dictate which spots are available to you. If you’re taking a tile from the game board to your player area, you can only take a tile from the area that corresponds with the pips of the dice you’re using. The same applies when placing a tile from your player board into your countryside, you can only place a tile on a spot that matches the colour of the tile, and the pip of your die. Of course, you can always use workers to modify your die pips to offset impossible situations, if you have them. You can always spend a die action to generate two workers, but that feels like a total waste of an action, so plan your turns wisely.
Every tile you place into your player board benefits you in some way. Many buildings give you a specific bonus action, grey mines will earn you silver every round, animals earn you points, yellow monastery tiles will either give you a persistent power, or, offer end game victory points. Furthermore, completing a province (a collection of same coloured spaces) will earn you victory points. More points the larger the province, and more points the earlier in the game you manage to do so.
All of these restrictions and bonuses makes The Castles of Burgundy feel like an intricate puzzle. Every action leads to more actions, and you’re constantly fighting between your short term gains and long term goals. Despite this complexity, the actual gameplay is broken down into bite sized pieces. On your turn, you have 2 dice. Some turns do spiral out of control when a player manages a wild combo of special actions that feels almost unfair, but for most of the game it’s just players quickly taking or placing tiles, then informing the next player it’s their turn.
The points in The Castles of Burgundy are plentiful and come from almost everywhere. The trick of the game is amassing more than your opponents. It doesn’t matter if you managed to score a respectable 186 points if everyone else around the table flew through the 200 point threshold. With points coming from a myriad of places, it can be hard to prioritize any one objective, especially when many of the big point scoring opportunities require more than the 2 actions you get on any given turn.
The most common criticism of The Castles of Burgundy is the bland, beige player board. There’s nothing exciting about a grid of hexes with dice printed all over the place. The next most common criticism is the luck factor, which inevitably comes up in any game where you roll dice to dictate your actions. It’s crushing when you roll double 2’s for four turns in a row. You exhaust all you can possibly do with those numbers, and end up burning actions to generate more workers in a desperate attempt to do anything. Further to that, it sucks when other players just happen to roll exactly what they needed every round. That said, there are 25 dice rolls per game, the luck should balance out with that many rounds.
In the years following the original release, two more editions have been produced. In 2019, Alea and Ravensburger published a new edition with updated artwork and a couple expansions included (the pictures in this post are from this version), then in 2021 Arcane Wonders crowdfunded a lavish new edition. While I haven’t laid my hands on the latter, I recently played with my friends copy of the 2019 edition, and felt quite disappointed. The new art is lush and colourful, but the iconography on the tiles is incredibly small and hard to read. I have read that this edition is more colourblind friendly, but it’s still not perfect. I vastly prefer my old copy to this newish edition.
As I said before, The Castles of Burgundy is a modern classic at this point. It’s been over a decade since its original release, some would argue it’s prolific designer Stefen Feld’s best game. It’s the kind of game that everyone who is interested in the board game hobby should play at some point, and while the original version is a beige map with a boring cover, the gameplay itself holds up spectacularly. It’s wildly satisfying to play and offers a great experience, even after a decade of playing board games.
Right from the get-go, Wandering Towers sets a joyous tone. The Tall box art depicts a witch on a hill, holding her wand aloft, causing a stack of towers to rise from the earth below, as a woodland animals flee in bug-eyed horror.
In Wandering Towers, you play as procrastinated wizards. The goal is to fill your potion bottles and get all the wizards of your house into castle Ravenskeep. Players can either move their wizards, or move the towers on the board, which may stack up and trap wizards on the lower levels. Trapping wizards under towers allows you to bottle their magical essence and fill your potions, which furthers your victory conditions. Players can expend full potions to activate some magic spells to tip the scales to their favour.
The titular towers are made of cardboard, and must be assembled prior to the first play. These are thick cardboard pieces that fit very snugly together, but the box easily accommodates them in their assembled state, removing the need to disassemble them between plays. Thank goodness!
The wizards are custom meeples in 6 different colours, but not all wizard clans are equal. There’s 5 yellow and blue wizards for 2 player games, 4 red and green for the 3 and 4 player game, and 3 orange and purple for the 5 and 6 player game. I dislike that I can’t choose to be purple when I want to play a two player game, it feels really cheap to skimp on the number of wizards for each colour.
Designers Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer have a long a storied history of creating excellent games, both as a collaborative duo, and as solo designers. From 6 Nimmt! to Azul, to Vikings, to Downforce and El Grande, these two designers have proven time and again that they know how to make great games. And Wandering Towers is perhaps a bit of a departure in terms of theme, but in the quality of the gameplay, their polish and experience shines through.
The board is a circular track on which all the towers sit, some towers and board spaces have an eagle crest that dictates where castle Ravenskeep will move to, but other than that, the board is just spaces to move on. Each player is given 3 cards, and on any given turn, a player plays two of their cards, carrying out the depicted moves, then draws back up to 3 cards. Everything moves in a clockwise direction, and the first player to fill all their potion bottles and drop all their wizards into the tower is the winner.
The artwork and aesthetic of Wandering Towers is light, breezy, and whimsical, kind of like a Studio Ghibli movie. It’s childlike in the joy that comes from clamping a tower down on your opponents. Very quickly, Wandering Towers turns into a shell game. You’ll think you have a bead on where all of your wizards are, but then two tower shuffles later, and you’ll be left wondering where all your friends have gone off to.
The core gameplay and strategy of Wandering Towers is fairly simple. But the fun isn’t in peeling back layers of depth, it’s found in dropping towers on your friends heads. Round and round you’ll go moving your wizards or clamping down a pile of picks, trapping your friends. Because you need to trap wizards 6 times before you can attempt to win the game, everyone will get caught several times. It’s take-that, but it ends up feeling evenly distributed. And yes, you do need to move that tower off your head before your wizard can continue on their journey to Ravenskeep, it doesn’t feel horrible, because you can remember where they are. Right? And no matter how many towers are stacked on your head, it only takes one action to move the tower along the path, so you’re never buried in a way that makes you feel like it’s impossible to catch up.
There was one game where my partner boldly declared “my wizard is right there”, and pointed halfway up a small spire of cardboard. I nodded, believing her as I was focusing on remembering where two of my other wizards were, and we continued to play. A few turns later, she played her a card to move towers and said “I’ll reveal my last wizard here, and then I’ll move it into the keep for the win!” as she lifted the tower, she was greeted not with the friendly blue wizard she was looking for, but with my yellow wizard instead. We were both shocked. We were both positive that her wizard was indeed in that tower, the final blue pawn was now lost, potentially under any tower on the board.
It’s those lapses in judgment that bring a smile to my face. The unexpected shock of discovering your memory is fallible. The frantic shuffling of towers, making all the other hidden wizards revealed, or hopelessly lost.
At the end of the day, Wandering Towers is a quick and light game. It’s fun, it’s interactive and combative without feeling like you’re being directly attacked, and never makes you feel like you’re out of the running. The tactile nature of stacking towers is satisfying, and the attempts at distracting your opponents in the hopes that they’ll forget which level their wizard is on brings a smile to my face. The production is lovely, and it’s just a fun toy to play with.
As a child, my sister and I would sometimes visit my aunt and uncle. They lived about 4 hours away, so it wasn’t every weekend, but twice a year or more we’d make the trip over and spend a week there. We were about 10 years younger than my cousins, so there wasn’t much in the way of age appropriate toys and games for us to play with. By the time I was 6, all the kids toys seemed to move on from the household.
What was left behind was a smattering of board games. While I have memories of hours long games of Risk at the table, my sister and I ended played a lot of Guess Who together. It was a great toy for us, the snappy plastic tray, flipping down faces as we deduced who each other’s secret identity was, then just a quick flip of the tray to reset the game.
Dinosaur Tea Party by Rob Daviau, JR Honeycutt, and Justin D. Jacobson, published by Restoration Games in 2018 seeks to re-imagine the deductive reasoning game from my youth, but puts a charming coat of paint onto the formula. Instead of cartoonish floating heads for me to pick out the features, players are tasked with remembering the name of the dinosaurs that have come to the tea party. Every guest has a set of attributes that the players can ask about, like if they have a hat, or are currently snacking, or if they’ve brought their pet along to the party.
Players each take a card depicting one of the 20 possible dino guests, then ask questions of the other players to try and narrow down who they have on their card. The game culminates with a guess of who they think their opponents are, and the first player to guess correctly 3 times is the winner. Some dinosaurs will have quirks to throw you off, like one will always lie, while another will alternate their answers. There are plenty of little chits that you can use to keep track of who has been asked what.
Making things even more exciting, artists Matijos Gebreselassie and Jason Taylor have imagined each of these dinosaurs as the Victorian gentry. With genteel demeanour, large stuffy hats, and dainty pinkies up while sipping their tea. To add an extra layer of charm, the rulebook demands that everyone embodies the attitude and conduct of a Victorian Nobel. “Gerald, lovely of you to join us! Come hang your hat and have a spot of tea” “Gertrude, what lovely spots you have, I can’t imagine the effort it takes to maintain that complexion” “Amelia, you’re looking rather handsome these days!” “Not handsome enough if you can’t remember my name!” If you’ve been submerged in media such as Jane Austin’s novels, or Downton Abby, it’s great fun speaking in a hoity-toity manner.
Dinosaur Tea Party is a simple game, it’s not strategic, or fair by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a catalyst for imagination, it’s whimsical and hilarious with the right group. For me, the right group always includes my 6-year-old niece. With a cup of tea and cucumber sandwiches, she loves playing make believe and falls right into her role. The purpose of Dinosaur Tea Party isn’t to scratch the deductive reasoning centres of my brain, but it’s to build a relationship with my family. It excels and creating memories and bonds, and for that, I am thankful.
Sea Salt & Paper is a card game that’s about as clear as a foggy day on the open sea. It’s brought to us by Bruno Cathala and Theo Riviere, and let me tell you, it’s a game that’s had me flip-flopping all over the place.
Bruno Cathala should be a household name at this point. From 7 Wonders Duel to Five Tribes to Kingdomino to Mr. Jack Pocket and so much more, he’s produced many games that I’ve enjoyed, to the point where when his name is on a box, I take notice. Theo Riviere on the other hand, while having dozens of titles to his name, I’ve not experienced a single one.
Sea Salt & Paper is a bit like rummy, but it’s got a few tricks and twists up its sleeve. You draw cards, build a hand, meld cards, and aim to “go out,” all in the name of scoring points. Sounds simple, right? Sea Salt & Paper starts deviating from the norm by having two discard piles, one card in each at the start. On your turn, you can draw the top card from either pile or take a gamble and draw two cards from the deck, keeping one and discarding the other into either trash pile.
Once the cards are in your hand, they’re all searching for their partners. You can play a meld if you’ve got the appropriate pair, and you’re in the mood for a little special power. These special powers can change the tide of the game. Pairs of boats give you an extra turn, two crabs will let you fish around in the discard pile and sneak an extra card into your hand, fish will just pull the top card from the deck into your hand. The sharks and swimmers on the other hand will let you steal a card from your opponent’s hand, like a dastardly pirate.
But it’s not just about pairs and special powers; there are other cards in the game that’ll push you to collecting whole sets of cards. Sailors are worth squat on their own, but can make a pretty penny if you collect both of them. Shells and octopuses? Worthless on their own, but they get more valuable the more you collect. Penguins? Same story. And then there are these multiplier cards that offer extra points for these sets, pushing you even harder to ignoring the power cards and gathering the appropriate sets. Lastly, there are mermaids that score based on the number of cards in your most abundant colour. Oh, and they have this push your luck mind-boggling “shoot-the-moon, win-the-entire-game” effect that’s about as rare as a unicorn sighting.
So, what’s the name of the game? Score the most points, of course. When someone has at least 7 points on the board and in their hand, they can trigger the end of the round. They’ve got two choices. You can call STOP and end the round right then and there, and everyone scores the points in their hand. Or, you can shout LAST CALL and bet that your opponents can’t beat your score in one turn. If you win the bet, you score your cards and a colour bonus, while your opponents score only their colour bonus. If you lose the bet, your opponents score their card points, while you only score your colour bonus. After the round ends, all the cards are gathered, reshuffled, then you play again. First player to 40 points takes the crown.
Now, if all of these rules sounds like quite a mouthful for what should be a simple card game, that’s because it is! Sea Salt & Paper feels unnecessarily obtuse with it’s 9 different card types, 4 different powers, and 4 multiplier cards, all interacting with each other in different ways. The rules are as clear as a stormy night at sea, and the game doesn’t hold your hand.
My first play of Sea Salt & Paper felt dismal. It felt like I had no agency, the cards I got never seemed to work, and by the time I managed to get a single meld, someone ended the round. It felt like a random, muddy mess to me. Thankfully, I kept at it, and subsequent games revealed quite a bit of nuance that I completely missed on my first play. I realized just how much of a push-your-luck game Sea Salt & Paper really is. It gives you a dozen different paths and tries to lure you down each one of them. Holding melds in your hand is powerful, allowing you to capitalize on its full power, but you risk someone else calling a sudden end of the round.
One thing I haven’t touched on yet is the charming and gorgeous card art. Nearly every card features a unique origami vignette. It’s so utterly cute and calming that I can’t help but be relaxed and enjoy Sea Salt & Paper. I’ve said before, but pretty games bring people to the table. Even if someone is frustrated by the obtuse rules, gorgeous card art will keep players engaged, even if only to discover all the variety of fish that exist. And by the time the discovery has worn off, the rules feel much less obtuse.
Sea Salt & Paper is a beautiful game for calm moments. This is the deck of cards you should bring with you on vacation, or at the beach. It takes no table space, it’s attractive, and the nuance of all the card interactions allow you to play again and again, discovering new strategies every time. It’s worth summiting the learning curve, and makes for a great afternoon game with friends and family.
