Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We host a weekly games night, and have over 200 games on the shelf. I mention this to let you know that when I review a game, I have some exeperience with games. We all have different tastes in games, so I will try to let you know why I have the opinion that I do about a game. Castles of Mad King Ludwig has some similar elements from Suburbia, also by Bezier Games, also designed by Ted Alspach. You are building something, tiles, score track, market track, when you build a tile, you get points for the tile and for how it interacts with other tiles already built. However, there are substantial differences that make this very much NOT a re-skin of suburbia. First off, the castle theme is fantastic. I just want to play with the tiles and build a castle. I plan to do a time-lapse video of this game to show how the castle builds up. The theme and the components are compelling, at least for me. I hope the expansion (do we get an expansion Ted?) includes walls and gatehouses and such. I saw this game being demo'ed at gencon and was hooked by the theme even before I had any clue how the game played. The theme is suburbia is good, the theme here is better. When you are done with the game, your castle is an interesting, and yes slightly mad, creation. My group has fun looking at the castles and trying to figure out the story behind the castle. This one has a lot of outdoor space, that one is mostly underground, the other one is full of kitchens and food related rooms. Second, the scoring is different. It's a little simpler here. The score track doesn't have the red lines that make it harder to progress as your creation gets bigger. If you like complex games, that's a win for suburbia, but I don't think it takes away from this game at all. The red lines in suburbia help reflect the theme of city planning getting harder as the city grows, it would be out of place in Castles. Each upstairs room scores it's listed value, as well as scoring for rooms it connects to, or you lose points for rooms adjacent to entertainment rooms. Each downstairs room scores points for every room of a certain type you have built upstairs. There are 4 common goals that everyone is trying to max out for end of game scoring. As you complete rooms, by connecting every doorway in the room to another room, you have the opportunity to get cards that provide hidden scoring goals for you. The big difference is in buying the tiles. Each turn one player is the master builder. Unused tiles from previous turns get a 1,000 coin token each, to encourage people to buy them. Then the master builder draws cards to determine which rooms are added to the mix. The master builder then assigns a value to each room on the buying track. In suburbia, tiles get cheaper over time, in Castles, the master builder sets the price. Then players take turns buying tiles, with the master builder buying last. The real trick is that all the other players pay the master builder. Selling rooms is how you get your money each turn. The master builder buys from what is left, and he pays the bank. This makes setting the price of the room tiles very important. You can make the high scoring rooms more expensive for your opponents, maybe even too expensive. When buying rooms you can take lower scoring rooms, and deprive your opponents of money they might need to buy their own rooms. The whole master builder mechanic makes this game much more involved than it appears. If you know what your opponents are trying to do with their castle, and what will score them more points, you can influence what they build, or how much they spend. Completing outdoor rooms gets you bonus money, which feels like a good idea, but it scores fewer points, and can be a very attractive distraction from actually winning the game. I highly recommend this game, if the castle theme appeals to you.