Castles of Burgundy Review

Hex! Hex, hex, hex! I can’t stop thinking about hex. Beautiful, pointy hex. It’s on my mind constantly, everywhere I look! Footballs, biros, even the pointed roofs of houses. And it’s all Castles of Burgundy’s fault.

Castles of Burgundy, named for… the colour burgundy – famously the most tedious of all the reds – is itself one of the most tedious games in the world to look at. Like someone left a functionally illustrated canvas out in the sun too long, then spilt their tea on it. Except these illustrations were just hexagons and dice. Even the damn score track doesn’t fit on the board neatly. Could a game this drab, this devoid of anything even resembling emotion, truly insight the kind of passion worthy of an obsession bordering on love? Why yes, yes it can.

 

Castles of Burgundy Player Board

 

How can that be? Well I’m going to tell, but I must ask you to be patient. This is not the kind of game that flashes you a filthy smile from across a bar with the promise of wild, crazy, even freaky, hex. No, this game gives you every reason to pass it by, but take a chance and it will blow your mind. So remember that, when you read the next sentence.

Castles of Burgundy is about building a medieval French estate. I know, I know, bear with me. Your estate is that morose looking cow pat of coloured hexagonal spaces. Over the course of the game, you steadily fill those spaces with hexagonal tiles. Maybe they’ll be buildings to fill your towns, boats to carry your goods or, er, knowledge to, erm, I have no idea why knowledge takes up physical space. Libraries? Anyway, the rule is that the colour of tile you place will match the colour of the space, thereby defining the possible scope of your final estate. Everyone will have the same number of each colour of tile, but the geography of your estate, how the colours are arranged will be different, and these differences can have a big effect on the game you’ll play, because of two simple rules.

 

Castles of Burgundy Estate

 

Rule 1 is about scoring. You’ll score for completely filling each patch of a single colour. You’ll score more points for completing a bigger area, and you’ll score yet more points for finishing an area earlier in the game. And if you’re the first player to complete every single hex of a single colour you’ll score even more points! It’s a generous game this. But this means that an estate with lots of small territories will take off like a rocket around the score track in the early stages, but then steadily splutter as the rounds go on, while the stodgy big territory based estates relentlessly chase them down, building speed towards a thrilling climax whose result is almost always impossible to predict.

The second rule is how you must always place your tiles next to something you’ve already built. You’ll start from your original castle and spread your hex based tendrils outward across the surrounding countryside like some tessellating virus. There’s no point picking up those mines if all your grey mountain spaces are on the far side of the board. Not only does this immediately limit what you can hope to build in the immediate future, it adds a whole new game of trying to maximise your access to new bits of territory, creating options for yourself in future turns. You’ll plan your building like a general directing the movement of his troops. And just like a general, those perfect plans will never survive contact with the enemy.

The enemy, in this case, are the two dice whose treacherous whims will determine your options in this game. They act as your available actions. Each turn you’ll roll them, then stare desperately at your board to see what you can possibly do. I’m sure you noticed those dice pips filling the centre of each hexagonal space. To place a tile in that space, you’ll need to have rolled that number, you’ll “spend” that die to place the tile there. Sound restrictive? It is! But you haven’t heard the half of it yet. Well, actually, you’ve heard almost exactly half…

 

Castles of Burgundy Main Board

 

The other half is centred on the main board that I’ve been hiding from you until now! It is from this market that you’ll be purchasing those tiles you want to place in your estate, and once again you’ll need a number matching the section from which you want to take a tile. “How can you ever get anything done in this game!?” you might be asking. Well therein lies the key for, as in life, it is not about doing whatever you want but about making the best of every opportunity you’re given. Attempt to fight against the dicey storm and you’ll break, but be ready to bend with the wind and you will be swept forwards past your struggling opponents.

There are plenty of ways to mitigate the luck too. Workers let you modify a dice by plus or minus 1, silver lets you buy a tile straight from the central bin of the main board, a sort of black market that sells boats and buildings and cows. These resources can give you just enough flexibility to deal with the vagaries of the dice, but they are in ludicrously short supply.

 

Castles of Burgundy Goods

 

If that’s all this game was, rolling dice, picking up and placing tiles to fill your board, a kind of race to collect sets, it might already be a great, tense, challenging game. But the game takes off for a trip into the stratosphere when each tile you place triggers some kind of bonus. No longer is this a simple quest to fill up space. The tiles you choose to add to your estate matter so much. The choices you make about which coloured area to pursue have real strategic bearing on your game. Each of the different colours, the boats, the mines, the animals, the cities, knowledge and castles, all are a strategy worthy of pursuit in and of themselves. Sometimes that will be determined by the layout of your estate, sometimes you might be driven to one by your early dice rolls, but you have enough control in this game to say before you start that “this game, I’m going to try the boat strategy”.

These boats let you obtain goods that can be traded in for the weighty, valuable chunks of silver and of course, more points, but the boats also move you up the turn order, giving you first pick of the tiles each round. Mines will also earn you silver, but only at the end of each of the game’s 5 rounds, meaning you need to get in early to get full use of them. Animals will just spawn victory points depending on how many there are on the tile, but will also cause every other identical animal in that same pasture to score again. Knowledge gives you powerful abilities, or offers end game scoring bonuses, e.g. for having certain types of buildings. Speaking of buildings, the numerous types each offer a powerful one-shot ability that circumvents the normally punitive restrictions on the dice. And while the ability here is building specific, the all-powerful castles let you do any one action, for free, immediately.

 

Castles of Burgundy Animals

 

What finally puts the game into orbit is not any individual tile ability, but how the use of these abilities opens the door for truly fantastic turns. Turns that leave everyone around the table open mouthed in awe and you wanting to leap out of your seat. Picture this: you role your dice. With your first die, you sell your pile of trade goods for a smattering of points and, more importantly, that second piece of silver you need to grab the castle from the black market in the centre of the board. With your other dice, you place it, giving you a free action to place your city hall, completing that town region for a pile of points, but also letting you place another tile on the board. You place down your boat, leap ahead in turn order and grab the juicy pile of trade goods from the main board that everyone had been eyeing up to re-fill that recently vacated spot in your supply. The table groans in disbelief and you smugly turn to your neighbour, “your turn!”

Thing is, these turns like this aren’t just a vague possibility, they are regular events and your reward for playing well. The complexity of the game, through the numerous tile types and ludicrous array of knowledge tiles, can be overwhelming for new players and even though they might struggle to see these combos coming, just placing down a castle and getting a bonus action feels great! From that first success it is surprisingly easy to begin stringing together good moves. They arise naturally from the game’s rugged, fascinating landscape, but a skilled player can still groom that landscape into the form they desire like a gardener for, well, a rich estate. Isn’t that perfect?

 

Castles of Burgundy Dice

 

While I am on the subject of new players and complexity I want to make one final comment on the dice. They act as the perfect antidote to the incredible degree of complexity, the incredible array of options. They act as action limiters, focussing your attention on the numbers you’ve rolled, be they the spaces on your estate, or the market stalls on the board. This lets everyone, not just new players, cut through the decision space and kills the analysis paralysis that could have been a disastrous problem in this game. The game can still have you waiting a little while with 4 players, but if only because you’re so excited to take your turn!

I love Castles of Burgundy. It might look like something dug out of an old library by a particularly sadistic maths professor, and the colours can sometimes get confused, especially in poor light and in the game’s iconography, but get past the game’s looks and you’ll find a masterpiece of gameplay, the Mona Lisa of Euro games. The fact is, everyone can find pleasure in this game, just from the satisfaction of watching their estate grow. After 7 games of Castles, I’ve still not managed to completely fill an estate, but I’ve always been left tantalisingly close. I don’t even know if it’s possible but I’m so desperately excited for the next game to see if I can get closer. This drive is like nothing I’ve experienced from any other game.

 

Castles of Burgundy Turn Order

 

It is regularly said that Castles of Burgundy is a solo experience, and maybe that’s true. I could argue that you can passively aggressively take tiles other players want, and the turn order boat race can get surprisingly competitive, but all that is immaterial and, indeed a minor element of the game. The fact is I wouldn’t want to play this alone, even if the player interaction isn’t that important. The interaction happens outside of the game, in the shared experience. Watching a film is a solo activity, yet we still watch films together to share the experience. I love to see a great combo of actions be pulled off, share the groans when a player flies round the score track, to know that it is only a matter of time until I have stellar turn. And one day, when I manage to complete an estate, I want my friends to be there to see it.

 

Rating: So Damn Hexy

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