Simple fun

Deciding what to play first from the huge #SPIEL haul is difficult, as I want to play them all so much. The four day sleep deficit 😴 also finally caught up to us after the convention, so we decided it is best to restrict gaming choices to small games. 😅 So why not pick 🏰Castle Combo, a big crowd favorite? The lines at the Blackrock booth were huge, I think mostly thanks to this game.

It's one of those simple-but-awesome games. Each turn you will take a card from the display, put it into your tableau and activate its effect. After 9 turns you will have a completed 3x3 tableau which scores according to the cards you drafted. That’s it, you almost know how to play! 😁

The main restriction is the Messenger meeple that shows whether you can draft from the Village cards or the Castle cards. Before choosing a card you can pay a Key 🗝️ to either move this meeple, or to discard 3 faceup cards and draw new ones. 

🧐The only other thing to pay attention to is that you can only place your cards orthogonally adjacent to your already played cards, and that you cannot go out of the 3x3 shape. Oh, and if you run out of money or keys you can play a card facedown to earn some back.

That is basically a 2-3 minutes rules explanation and you are ready to play with 2-5 players! 😉 The fun of the game is choosing cards synergistically so their shield icons and banners nicely match all the scoring conditions. These conditions could check for specific rows or columns, or possibly your or your neighbour’s whole tableau at once. The deck of cards is quite big, so you can assemble quite some combos - I guess the name Castle Combo was chosen for a reason. 😅

All this neat and quick drafting game is accompanied by colorful quirky graphics which adds a fun aesthetic to the game. My biggest complaint would be that the game is over perhaps way too fast, but to combat that you could just play multiple games back to back to try out even more combos. 🙃