I sometimes forget that Kickstarter isn’t a thing that’s as well known outside of the board game circles. Every now and again I mention that I saw a project on Kickstarter to a work colleague or a parent at the playground, and I often get a “what’s a Kickstarter?”. It’s a bit wild to me that a platform that has become synonymous with crowdfunding to the hobbyist board game community is anecdotally unknown outside of this circle. I say this because I spend a significant amount of time reading about the games that are coming to, or are currently on Kickstarter. The podcasts I listen to (The Secret Cabal and Blue Peg Pink Peg specifically) often talk about just how many games the hosts have pledged to. Something else that’s significant is, considering how much time I spend browsing Kickstarter projects, is how few I actually pledge for. Flamecraft designed by Manny Vega and published by Cardboard Alchemy, was one of those projects that very nearly had me pledging, but like most, I ended up passing on, then felt the cold sting of FOMO when my social media feeds were covered in a deluge of deliveries and gameplay photos.
I don’t know where I’m going with this intro, but here we are. 2 and a half years after Flamecraft’s crowdfunding campaign launched, and I’m only just getting the opportunity to play it. The first thing anyone says about the game is just to mention how amazing it looks. The art is cute and charming, the names for the dragons and the shops are whimsical and adorable, the components (at least the deluxe upgraded ones) are absolutely stunning. Every single person who talks about Flamecraft will start with just how utterly gorgeous the game is. And for Flamecraft, that’s a very important point. The gameplay is quite simple, lending itself to be the kind of game that you use to coerce your non-gaming family and friends to the table.
Don’t get me wrong, a great looking game is an excellent tool for getting people to sit in the seats at your table. I’ve used Sagrada to successfully convince several people that board games aren’t in the doldrums like they used to be. Flamecraft is the kind of game that gets those around you to sit up and take notice. It’s not flashy, it’s charming. It has a quiet allure with its cute and colourful aesthetic. There is great value in looking good, and Flamecraft looks amazing.
Getting into the gameplay, it’s as simple as can be. On your turn you have to move your dragon pawn to any shop around the town board, then you gather all the goods at that shop (shops have a base value of 1, then each dragon in the shop gives another good, and each enchantment nets yet another good), and then either play a dragon card into a slot that matches the dragon from your hand (and gain the rewards from the slot) and/or use the fire ability of any one dragon in the shop, and if the shop has an ability, you may use that as well. Or, instead of doing all that, you can choose to enchant a shop instead. To enchant a shop, just pick one of the face up enchantment cards that matches the shop you just landed on, pay the cost, and Slide the enchantment card on under the top of the shop, then, fire all the dragons in that shop. Only If you want to, it’s not required.
Most of the game centres around gaining and then spending various resources to earn more points or get more dragons. All the normal dragons have unique names and artwork, but their abilities are static. Which at first I was a bit disappointed in, but after a few plays I realize how difficult it can be to parse just 6 abilities and 6 available shops. Giving every dragon a unique ability would have slowed the game down to a crawl, so I’m glad they chose to keep them all the same.
At the beginning of the game, you’ll find yourself looking at the enchantment cards and thinking, “how am I ever going to earn 4 leaves and 4 diamonds to complete Imp’anadas?”. But by the end of the game you’ll go to a shop, pick up 5 tokens from the dragons and enchantments, and fire a diamond dragon to gain an additional 3 goods. Flamecraft gives players an incredibly feeling of progression. Things get better, and faster, and easier, players build their engines up to a crescendo. Where there used to be poverty, and you were wondering about the 7 item limit that felt impossible to reach, suddenly you’ll find yourself buried in bread and having to throw some back into the supply.
In addition to the normal dragons, players can also earn Fancy dragons. The fancy dragons are a special type of card, and they come in two suits. Suns and Moons. The suns can be played at any time their conditions are satisfied for a nice little boost, while the moon dragons are end game scoring conditions, such as “have the most meat tokens” or “earn points if you have an even number of goods”. These can vary wildly, and if you just so happen to pick up 3 or 4 that work well together, then you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank. It’s not quite a criticism, but more of a comment that I didn’t feel like I was in control of my own destiny when playing Flamecraft.
Flamecraft features very little player interaction. Most of it comes from just getting in each other’s way. When you want to visit a shop, but someone else is already there, you simply need to pay them a single good. A few cards will also see you distributing goods around the table for a bigger benefit for yourself, but that’s the extent of the interaction. You aren’t able to stop anyone from doing anything, other than doing it yourself before they do (such as completing those enchantments). And that’s fine, for a game that I’d use to introduce people to the board game hobby, I don’t want it creating any bad feelings. But for me, it makes me feel like I have very little agency. If I win, it’s not because I did the best, but just because I got lucky.
At the end of the day, Cardboard Alchemy has crafted a beautiful and charming game, one that is sure to be a hit with those perhaps on the periphery of this board game hobby. I love seeing all the stories of people discovering how munch fun board games are via a play of Wingspan, and I feel like Flamecraft has a lot of the same qualities. I don’t know what secret sauce Wingspan has that made it such a seminal hit, but I would love to see Flamecraft held up alongside it as an excellent, charming, beautiful game for people of all walks of life.
I’ve often thought I’m very good for not judging a book by its cover. Some of my favourite books have the most boring covers, but I don’t let that deter me! The Book of Flying by Keith Miller comes to mind specifically. The cover to that book has some porcelain looking humans with bat wings leaping off a short tower, with the entire image awash in sepia. The story within is a beautifully written poetic story of a man, Pico, adventuring to find the book of flying so he can earn his wings and join his one true love in the skies as he was born without wings and therefore isn’t t accepted in the winged persons’ society.
I’m glad I fostered this habit when my hobbies transitioned into Board Games, because if I judged Concordia by its oversized cover, I would never entertain the notion of playing this game. Contained behind the box cover, emblazoned with a smiling woman buying cloth, reveals a map of ancient Rome and bagfuls of wooden shapes. Minor component gripe, the scale of the items seems off. The cloth is much larger than the bundles of wheat, and the bags of salt from the Salsa expansion absolutely dwarfs everything else. Perhaps it’s to represent how important salt was two thousand years ago, but it just ends up looking a bit silly.
The board of ancient Rome is colourful without looking garish, and the cards are clear, great for conveying information, which is important as the cards drive this entire game.
Players begin a game of Concordia with 2 colonists on the board. One land-bound and the other sea faring, plus one of each good, and a handful of cards. On your turn you play a card, do what it says, then play passes to the next player. In Concordia, when a card is played, it stays down, until you play the Tribune card, which allows you to take all those action cards back into your hand, plus a small reward of coins based on how many cards you take back. In addition, you can pay a food and tool token to produce a new colonist in Roma.
The Architect card lets you move your colonists, one step for every colonist you have on the board (although you can distribute your movement steps amongst your colonists however you wish). After moving, colonists can build houses in cities they’re adjacent to, for a set of resources and a small amount of coins. If there are already buildings in the city, the coin cost is multiplied by the number of buildings that will be in the city once the build is completed.
So what’s the point of buildings? Well, when someone plays a Prefect card, they can choose any province to produce goods into. Every house produces the good of the city it’s built on for its owner, and the player who played the prefect card gets a bonus good, which is the most valuable good available in the region. In addition, there is a Prefectus Magnus card flowing around the table, which doubles the bonus good for the player who played the prefect. Alternatively, the prefect allows you to take the cash reward, which resets the bonuses for each of the provinces.
So you know you can use goods to build houses and produce colonists, but with the Mercator card, you turn those goods into cold hard cash. With any Mercator action, you can trade 2 types of goods. This means you can sell 6 tools (if you have them) and buy as much brick as you can afford. The Senator action also allows you to spend goods to take new cards into your hand. Generally, the cards you earn from the Senator are better than the cards you start the game with. Finally, the Diplomat allows you to copy the last played card of any player at the table, which can be very important to stretch out your turns.
Concordia comes to an end in one of two ways. Either someone builds their 15th building, or, the deck of cards flowing through the senate runs dry. At game end, every card you won awards you victory points in different ways. A card with “Jupiter” at the bottom will earn you 1 point for every non-brick city you have a house in. Saturnus earns you a point for every province that contains at least one of your houses. Mars awards 2 points per colonist you have on the board, and so on. It’s not uncommon to stack up on a single type of scoring card to maximize your efforts in a single area, as it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to do everything within the course of a single game.
I actually love this scoring system. It creates interesting points of tension where you’re willing to pay through the nose to snag a specific card, not because you want the action the card affords you, but because you want to end game scoring benefit instead. And unlike in traditional deck building games, having extra cards doesn’t ‘clog up’ your deck. You can play any card you want from your hand, and then play the tribune to bring them back to your hand at will.
Of course, the more often you bring your cards back into your hand, the fewer actions overall you’ll likely get. And the chances are that you will want to stretch out the periods between Tribunes, as there’s so much to do! From buying and selling goods, to building houses around the board, to moving your colonists to ensuring you have the right resources to produce new colonists when you do take that Tribune action, the opportunity cost of pulling those cards back is perfect.
Often when players talk about interaction in game, it’s in a negative light. You take something from someone, destroy their buildings, take away their hit points, or get somewhere before they do. In Concordia, you freely choose any province in which to produce goods, and every house gets to produce the good associated with the city that it’s built in. This leads to players building next to each other, hoping to benefit from each other’s Prefect actions. This bit of positive player interaction is something that I absolutely love to see.
It also creates a very interesting dynamic at the beginning of the game. Do you strike out far on your own so only you benefit from a producing province, leaving the rest to suffer in their poverty, or do you establish a symbiotic relationship with another player; both of you prioritizing that province for production, earning you both a steady income? While in the early game this is a question in everyone’s mind, by the end of the game nearly every player has expanded to end nearly every province, meaning every Prefect action is doling out resources at an unprecedented rate.
The endgame scoring is so heavily abstracted and the cards that are bought at the end of the game have a significant impact on the final scores, it’s impossible to tell who really is winning until the points are being calculated. I feel like this keeps everyone engaged and active for the entirety of the game.
Concordia sits high on both the boardgamegeek.com ranking list, and in my personal top 100 games list, for good reasons. It’s a fairly easy game to play, yet it has depth. There’s mastery to be discovered here, and the positive player interaction ensures that no player leaves with a sour taste in their mouth. The gameplay is smooth, the rule teach is unobtrusive, there’s a ton of maps to buy for instant variability, it really is the whole package for any euro-gamer.
There aren’t many games that I would call a “must play”, but Concordia absolutely is one of them. I don’t own Concordia myself, but only because one of my close friends owns it, plus multiple expansions. But let me tell you, if he or I ever move away from each other, Concordia will be the first game I buy to replace the gaping hole that will be created when my game group is torn asunder.
Alright, this game is better than it has any right to be. At the very least, consider me charmed.
Bag of Chips, designed by Mathieu Aubert and Théo Rivière and published by Blue Orange Games, looks like a literal bag of chips, a plastic/foil pouch with a resealable top. Inside are a variety of plastic chips of different colours, representing flavours. The gameplay deals each player 6 cards, each with a unique scoring condition and a number of points based on how likely or unlikely the goal on the card is going to be satisfied.
In the first round, 5 chips are pulled from the back and placed on a card. Then, all players must discard 2 goal cards. Then 4 more chips are pulled out and players must discard another goal card. In the penultimate round 3 chips are pulled, then players are told to make a choice. One of their goal cards will count for negative points, while the other two will be positive, should their conditions be met. Then the final 2 chips are drawn, scores are calculated, and whoever has the most and second most points gets a golden chip. First to 4 golden chips is the winner.
Bag of Chip feels like a luck fest. You’re at the mercy and whim of the cards you’re dealt and the chips that come up. Nothing you do will affect which chips are drawn, nor can you affect the others at the table. The only thing you can do is hope that your score is higher than theirs. Ultimately, the only choices you’re making are which goal cards to discard from your hand. I got the similar vibes to Poker. The only choice you’re making is how much to wager and hoping the odds are in your favour. Yes, there’s bluffing, and reading your opponents, but mechanically. Now there are no wagers in Bag of Chips, but you can bluff. Tell your friends that your cards are trash, so they take the lower scoring but safer goals, only for you to achieve your shoot-the-moon goal and win it all.
Perhaps I’m putting a lot more stock into Bag of Chips that it deserves. I like Push-your-luck games, and Bag of Chips makes my risk senses tingle. The euphoria when I need that last purple chip to come out on the final pull, and then when it did, it made my heart sing! The goal cards are all unique, and you’ll win or lose your game solely on if you were dealt and then chose to keep the right cards. For some, the lack of agency is frustrating. But for myself, I found it relaxing. I enjoyed playing the odds and being delighted when my gambles paid off
Bag of Chips is a small game that could be argued is more of a distraction than a full meal. It’s best enjoyed with cold beverages and salty snacks, perhaps while waiting for the main course to start. I have a hard time imagining Bag of Chips being anyone’s favourite game, or even top game of the year, but it’s one that easily fits in a bag and takes nearly no table space, making it the perfect pub/restaurant game.
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.
