After the red cathedral comes the white castle

🏯 The White Castle is an upcoming Spiel 23 title we have been waiting for... Impatiently! 😁 The designer duo Isra and Shei set the bar quite high with The Red Cathedral 🕍 which is a truly outstanding game in our opinion. So, how does White Castle compare? 🤔

The gameplay primarily revolves around dice 🎲 this time too. It’s a completely different, but very clever implementation yet again. Each round dice are rolled and put in ascending order - separately for the white, red and black dice. During your turns you can take a die either from the left or the right side of one of these rows: Dice on the right are usually of higher values, however taking from the left activates your so-called “lantern” bonus! 😉

You then place your die on one of the depicted spots. If it has a lower value than the depicted number there, you’ll have to pay coins - if it’s higher, you earn them. 🧐 The actions you can take at each spot vary based on the dice color, current cards, and tokens that are randomized during setup. This ensures endless replayability and presents exciting decisions regarding which die color and value to choose, as well as where to place it.

Now to spice this up, you have a tight resource management aspect with 3 resource types, seals and coins. Many of the actions revolve around gathering these or moving up the initiative or scoring track, but the main thing you are trying to do is to place your meeples.

🧹 Gardeners go to garden spaces where they generate a bonus - not just upon placement but also at the end of the round if there are still dice remaining next to them.

📜 Courtiers will ascend the rooms of the castle, earning bonuses and taking cards to improve your aforementioned lantern bonus.

🗡️ Warriors are sent outside the castle, also triggering bonus actions, and they score according to how many courtiers you have in the castle.

I have to mention: You play for 3 rounds, and each round you only take 3 dice. That’s only 9 actions in a game! 🙀 But I think it’s exactly this tightness with actions and resources that makes the game shine, and requires you to make clever decisions and string together combos all game long 🤩