Rainbow Castles

Today’s highlight is ⚔️ Muster: Raise the Banners - a family-friendly lane battler we discovered at UKGE last year, and which officially launched at this year’s Expo! 🙃

The game board shows 5 castles 🏰 of 5 different colors - whoever controls more of these when the deck runs out, wins. 🏆

To fight for control, players use a shared deck which has cards 🃏 of these 5 colors, with strength values ranging from 1 to 5. On your turn you just do an action (most often just playing a card), then draw back up to 5 cards. 

There are two main constraints to playing cards: 🧐 they have to match the color of the castle, and they have to go in ascending order. So if you played a 1, you can either play another 1 or a 2 on top. You could also start with a 4 for example, but then basically 1s, 2s and 3s of that color become mostly useless for you. It’s important to keep in mind what cards are already in play and calculate the best course of action. You also don’t want to place too many cards into a lane that you are already winning anyway, as the amount of turns are limited by the deck.

2 Rainbow 🌈 Castles spice the game up: you can play these on top of a castle instead of your side and from now on, anybody can play any cards in that lane. 

Another twist are the Rainbow Wizards 🧙. They have strength 6 that can be played on top of anything, but beware - if your opponent has a card that could legally go into that space, they can swap out the wizard and take it for themselves. Wizards can alternatively be played as Rainbow Bridges, letting you play cards you otherwise couldn’t (e.g. connect a 3 and a 5 strength card).

And, that's the gist of it! It is super quick, simple and easy to learn. Sometimes a bit random, but with the short playtime, that’s not an issue at all - we just play a best of 3 (or until Reni finally wins one too). 😆

Now I’d like to give extra attention to the illustrations. They look simply incredible! 🤩 I love how the strength 1s are footsoldiers, the 2s archers, the 3s cavalry, the 4s animals and the 5s kings. Also, each color has its theme like “desert” or “woods”. Really top-notch! 😁