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 Game review, 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.
