Castell Review
A human pyramid is an impressive sight, a few people stood on each others shoulders, but it holds nothing on a Castell! Harking from the Catalan region of Spain these terrifying towers of humanity reach dizzying heights and involve hundreds of people in and around the base. The meetings of such groups are spectacular contests, much like Castell, the game.
Players: 2-4
Time: 60-90 mins
Ages: 12+
Designer: Aaron Vanderbeek
Artist: Ossi Hiekkala, Jeanne Torres, Paul Tseng, Dan Wagner
Publisher: Renegade Game Studios
Castell is all about building little cardboard Castells from little cardboard people but, don’t worry, there’s no dexterity element here. Your Castells will be flat structures lying on your tabletop, which is the kind of challenge I can get behind. And while it might not sound as awesomely visually impressive as a physical tower, I think we can agree that it still looks pretty snazzy.
There’s something wonderful about this theme. It’s not just the appealing pastel colours or the attractive box cover that draws your eyes across its surface. Perhaps it’s the unexpected novelty of it, a part of this world that I had been more or less ignorant of before. But I think it’s also that it is both thoroughly competitive, but in a harmless, honest way. There is no throwing tomatoes at your opponent’s tower, no one quietly being harmed or exploited in the background of the theme. There’s a purity to it that feels oddly compelling. I look forward to more games about niche folk-sports!
Of course, there’s also the thoroughly unique mechanics that go along with this theme: building towers. There are three simple rules to Castell club:
- Don’t talk about – no, wait, wrong club. A level of your tower can never be more than 3 people wide.
- A level must have all the same type of people on it.
- A level must always have lower numbered and fewer people than the level below.
These rules let you build structures as exciting as this
Oh… that’s not very exciting. So how do you go from a piddly pyramid that would be laughed out of any Catalan village to the spectacular structure I showed off earlier? Well, you practice.
Your troupe of castelliers have 5 different skills they can train, any of which can let you expand your towers into more impressive specimens. Balance is probably the most essential skill for not falling over (who’d have thunk it, hey?) and that is reflected in being the easiest to train. A point of balance let’s you have one level that is the same width as the level it stands on.
Hey! We’ve got the makings of a half-decent tower here!
Base and Width are both skills that let you get past that 3 man limit on a level. A point of width increases the maximum width of the levels in your tower by 1. Dat Base let’s you have levels if any width you like, but only the bottom most levels, up to height set by your skill level. This is of course great if you have tons of the same numbered castellian. No, I don’t know the correct name for a person in a Castell.
But what if you don’t have enough people of the same number to really fill out a level? That’s where Mix comes in, letting you combine two numbers into the same level with the irritating subtlety that it has to be a Castell-dweller of the same height… physically, in real cardboard terms. That means the 7s & 8s can mix but not the 8s & 9s, say, and you can guarantee you’re going to mix this up at some point! But what if you have lots of the same type and not enough Width (or Dat Base) to use them all? Then what you need is Strength, letting that number of levels support the same value of castanet on the level above.
Now, I don’t usually like listing rules in a review and yet I’ve gone to great lengths to describe all the Castell skills. That’s because I wanted you to see the scope that arises not from each skill individually but in how they interact, opening your mind, flower-like, to the sunny potential of constructing these Castells. Pop quiz, what skills did I use to build this tower?
Well, the 4 man base required either level 1 Width or Base, we need level 1 Strength to get those two levels of 6 on top of each other, and there are 3 rows that are on top of rows of the same width, meaning we need Balance 3! Did you get it right?
As you can probably tell by this point, it is pretty hard to determine quickly whether what your opponents are building is legal or, for that matter, whether what you’ve built is strictly legal. Castell is a game, like being a part of a structure itself, that demands a decent amount of trust between players or threatens to fall apart. It’s not often that I play games that really require you to think hard about a set of such simple rules interact.
But that’s not where the true challenge of this game lies. Oh no. That honour belongs to the board.
Ooo! Look! A spinner!
NO! DON’T TOUCH THAT! I’m sorry, Castell is a serious game and nowhere does it make its seriousness clearer than by adding a gaudy spinner to the board that only ticks forward a fixed segment each round. This spinner, and the randomly distributed skill tokens around it, tells you in which region you can train which skill this round. That’s right, you need to be in the right place at the right time if you want to level up a particular skill. And this is a theme you’re going to get used to.
On the board you have a ridiculously over-wrought Castell tower player piece which you can move a single space each round. A single space! I mean, obviously you would want to move an entire tower very slowly, but this, as you will soon find, is painfully slow! Because one other thing you can do is train, but the skill you train is determined by what space you are in. You can hire two new castaways from a region you are in… but there are 10 different sizes and the regions only refill every two rounds. While you can do a special action to do an extra move or an extra recruit, it costs a special action token and you don’t have enough for every round of the game. And then there’s how you score!
The first is via festivals, shown across the top of the board. These exciting opportunities to display your Castell building prowess happen at the end of every round in one or two locations on the map. But not only do you have to be there to enter, you also need to have cast…er sugars matching each of the size tokens underneath. And then you want as many of those people, and to build as high, as you possibly can as you’ll get one point for each… but only to set a new personal best. You might also get a few points for beating other players (if they’re competing, and you win) and you’ll collect the size tokens for which you have most. But that’s all.
In some ways it might be better building up to one big tournament than chasing all the little ones… but then you also miss out on lots of small bonuses. The alternative big point scorer is performing your own local performances, which require you build either a specific shape, or a tower using a specific combination of skills and, once again you want to be in the right place at the right time.
This entire game is an impossible puzzle of timing, of being in the right place at the right time. It’s a tough game, but it’s not especially difficult to learn and teach. The hardest trick is, as I’ve said, the skills, but the turn structure is incredibly simple, intentionally so, to keep the puzzle moving and prevent you from becoming overwhelmed. Indeed, I’m struggling to come up with any real point of criticism! It’s expensive, but then it comes with a lot of cardboard tokens so it feels like a fair price. Er… they went to an incredible effort with the insert
But all those castellians just get mixed up into the cavernous depths of the bag you may have seen on various youtubers’ heads on social media recently. So you might as well just throw it away? Yeah… I think that’s it. The biggest criticism I’ve got is that you’ll never get to use the precision engineered insert. You know I think that, on balance, I really really like this game!
Rating: Towering
Our copy of Castell was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can get a copy from your favourite hobby store for £57.99 RRP.
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