A great expansion for a great game!
🏯 White Castle is one of those games where I say it feels whole and doesn’t need an expansion. That doesn’t mean an expansion for it cannot be great, but I honestly couldn't imagine what it would look like! ☝️ And then we tried 🍵 White Castle Matcha. 😉
The base game has this symmetry of having 3 dice colors, and 3 resource types that correspond to the 3 meeple types you can place on the board. So Matcha brings the most logical addition: 👉 a 4th type of dice, meeple and resource. This change is pretty significant, as it expands the game from 9 turns to 12 turns. That's 33% more gaming! 😮
The game board gets an extension, which depicts the new actions and new locations: The Outskirts of Himeji, the Tea House with 3 rooms, the Pond Overlook, and of course another bridge to hold the green dice. The core rules do not change - you still draft a die each turn, and you still have to obey placement rules. That said, the new green dice can’t be used everywhere however! They can’t go to the castle (there is no green colored tile), but they can be used at the well, outside the wall and of course on your player board - speaking of… you’ll get a brand new one!
The new Geisha 👘 meeples work pretty similarly to the base game’s Courtiers. You have to pay coins to add a new Geisha to the gate of the garden, then you can pay the new resource Chasen (which are the little whisks used to prepare tea) to advance your Geishas in one of 2 directions: 1 path leads to the pond - once a Geisha arrives here, she grants a similar income effect like the Gardeners. The 2nd path leads to the tea house - if your Geisha completes her journey here, you choose a room to place her in and carry out the action of the corresponding tile. These rooms also grant additional scoring at game end.
💭There are many nuances we could talk about here, but what I love the most is how well this expansion is integrated. While there is nothing to be fixed in the base game, it really adds more replayability and combo options - and maybe some complexity to the mix, without any “tacked-on” elements! If you already love the base game and want some extra challenge, Matcha is definitely worth considering!
