Expert
Alter
Spezial
Pastures, Wares or castles
The Castles of Burgundy
An outstanding game of developments
(Die burgen von Burgund)
Over the last years the series of alea games in the big box has unfortunately not been expanded every year. In 2011 we can be happy about a new addition to the series. If the Castles of Burgundy come up the series, which features quite a lot of notable games, will be the purpose of this review.
The designer of the game is Stefan Feld, not an unknown quantity anymore, he has designed the latest “big” alea games, too.
Players assume the roles of princes in the valley of the Loire and try to develop the most magnificent estate by trade, economy and buildings. Not really an original new topic, but alea has never been famous for the uniqueness or originality of its topics.
The game is played in 5 phases with 5 rounds each. The players are active in turn and make their move. The sequence of play changes during the course of the game, but more on that later (see ships).
A move of a player comprises rolling the dice and taking two actions.
Each player rolls the two dice of his color and the starting player also rolls a white die. On the board 5 warehouses are pictured, each showing one possible result of a die roll. A commodity is placed onto the warehouse determined by the result of the white die.
The two colored dice are needed to implement the two actions, one die corresponds to one action.
You have choice of four different actions:
Take a hexagon tile off the board.
On the board six displays with each up to four hexagons in it are available, in correspondence with the number of players. As are the warehouses, these displays, too, are assigned to the results of dice rolls. For an action you can take a tile from the display corresponding to the result of one of your dice and place it into your personal stock. In your stock you can never have more than four tiles; if you take a fifth tile you must discard one of those already in stock.
Place a hexagon in your own estate.
The tiles from your own stock can be placed in your estate. Each player has his own board on the table showing his personal estate consisting of 37 hexagon spaces. Eac of these hex spaces have different colors and are marked with dice results, too. On such a space you can only place a tile of the same color, and it needs an action with a die showing the result that is also depicted on the hex space on the board. A further restriction for placement is that you can only place tiles on spaces next to already filled spaces, at the beginning each player has only one occupied space.
The hexagon tiles are available in six different colors with different functions. Those functions only come into play when the tile is placed on the estate, tiles in your personal stock have no effects whatsoever. Most of the tiles have once-only effects that are activated when placing a tile, but there are exceptions to this rule.
Here comes a short list of the different sorts of tiles with their corresponding colors in brackets:
Knowledge (yellow): Knowledge brings permanent advantages or victory points at the end of the game.
Ship (blue): Ships change the sequence of play and allow you to collect all commodity tiles in a warehouse. The more ships a player owns the earlier in the round he has his turn.
Animals (light green): There are four different kinds of animals – cow, chicken, sheep and pig. Each tile shows 2 to 4 animals of a kind. A player immediately scores points corresponding to the number of animals on the pasture and of the kind that was just placed. A pasture is an area of connected light green tiles on the estate.
Castle (dark green): Castles allow an immediate additional action with any dice result.
Mine (grey): At the end of a 5-round phase players receive one silverling each for each on their own mines.
Buildings (brown): There are eight different buildings with different functions, which need not be listed in detail here, basically they all give you additional actions.
After all tiles have been placed players must check if one area of a color has been completed. A color area consists of one to eight connected spaces of one color in your estate. An area is completed when all spaces are filled. For a completed area you score victory points, the earlier an area is completed and the bigger the area is the more points you score for it. If the tile was not only the last tile of an area but the last tile of this color (meaning, that all spaces of this color in the estate of a player are now filled) you score more additional points – but only if you have been quick enough, because only the first two players doing so score the bonus points.
Sell commodities
The commoditiy tiles too come in six different varieties, each variety again corresponds to a result of a die roll. Using the action of a die with the corresponding result you can sell all commodity tiles of one kind. This earns you between two and four victory points depending on the number of players and one silverling regardless of the number of sold tiles.
Take worker tiles
This action is independent from the result of a die roll, you use any die for it. If you take the action you receive two worker tiles. These worker tiles can be used anytime to rise or lower the result of the action dice by 1.
In addition to the two normal action you can buy a tile from the black warehouse for the price of two silverlings. This black warehouse is supplied like all the other warehouse displays with hexagon tiles of all colors, but is not marked with a die result. If you buy a tile from this warehouse, you chose one and place it into your stock as you do in the action Take a hexagon tile off the board.
Between phases all displays, including the black warehouse, are stocked again, after all tiles remaining from the previous phase are taken out of the game. This is not the case for the commodity warehouses, goods there accumulate in each round until the warehouses are emptied by the players.
After the last phase a final scoring takes place: Money, workers, unsold commodities and some of the hexagon knowledge tiles score points for you and the winner after this is the player with the highest total of points.
Fazit
The Castles of Burgundy offer a plethora of possibilities to the players. If possible you want to to all and everything, take everything, build everything and if possible before your nasty fellow players who might take away something or snatch the coveted bonus points away because they built the last tile of the color just before it is your turn.
Especially at the start of a phase, when the displays are still full, decisions are hard to take and have far-reaching consequences. Near to the end of a phase there is not much left in the displays and you are sometimes glad to be able to do anything useful. It cannot hurt in such a situation to have done a little planning beforehand so that you have a few options left. The dice in this moment can be rather irritating because they narrow the possible selection of actions drastically. All in all the chance factor is pretty contained. As there are 50 dice results per player in the game you can assume that the distribution of the numbers will pretty much even out. And in addition to that, you can change the result by using worker tiles.
To be honest, I love that kind of game. The many options allow you to try out many different strategies, which is supported by the different kinds of estates, which have been added to the game for experienced players and they offer very varying starting positions; this enhances the attraction for playing again. After the handful of games I did play it seems to me that the balancing seems very well done – no strategy seems to be a dominant one, it is always important to keep an eye on your opponents and react tactically and cleverly.
The many opportunities of course are fraught with the danger of fiddling about, the duration of the game is very much dependet on the players and can easily stray on the long side.
Some small criticism must be directed at the graphics, light green and yellow are hard to distinguish. Apart from this, the components are very nice and of good quality, and, again typically for alea, you find mainly well-done cardboard tiles in the box.
„An extraordinary game of developments on pastures, goods and dice“, we are told by the subtitle of the game on the box. I would not call it a classic development game, as it lacks the opportunities and possibilities to use actions to acquire permanent advantages – this only is possible in a very limited way from the knowledge tiles, but the rest of the slogan is okay. The Castles of Burgundy did not invent board games anew, but it offers a few new ideas which I have not seen in exactly this form. The good old classic die is nicely integrated into the game without giving troubles.
To players who like it a bit on the complex side and who are not deterred by some 10 pages of easily understood rules I can recommend The Castles of Burgundy with a clear conscience.
Markus Wawra
Spieler : 2-4
Alter : ages 12 and up
Dauer : 90 min
Autor : Stefan Feld
Grafik : Julien Delval, Harald Lieske
Titel : Die Burgen von Burgund
Preis : ca. 35 Euro
Verlag : alea / Ravensburger 2011
Genre : A game of acquisition and placement
Zielgruppe : For experts
Mechanismen: Collect and place tiles
Kommentar:
Interesting mix of mechanisms
Small chance element in rolling dice
Many strategies to try
Good components
Rules easily understood
Vergleichbar mit:
Agricola, Macao
Meine Wertung: 6
Markus Wawra:
So many choices to shape your estate, so many ways to set about it! Since Agricola no game has caused such a feeling of “I want to do so much and may do so little” than this game, simply commendable.
Zufall 2
Taktik 2
Strategie__ 3
Kreativität
Wissen_
Gedächtnis 1
Kommunikation
Interaktion 2
Geschicklichkeit
Action