The Three Little Pigs but with castles

This Friday we are looking at 🏰 Castle Raisers from Wonderful World Board Games! 

I love how this one takes inspiration from The Three Little Pigs, but with a twist. Instead of facing a single wolf, you’re defending against an entire horde. And instead of a simple house, you’re raising a fortress out of straw, wood, and stone. 😁

It’s all about clever tile-laying: 🧩 To construct their castles, players draft wall tiles and layer them over each other, triggering the action icons that get covered. The game plays out over 3 Ages, with each player drafting 4 walls per Age - that’s 12 turns total, and plenty of actions to score big!

There are 5 core actions:

🏘️Place Village tiles inside your castle to amplify future actions, and finetune your end game scoring.

🐽The Prestige action provides prestige tokens for extra points.

🏰The Fortify action gives you extra wall pieces that cannot cover up icons, but help raise the walls. At the same time it also makes your castles cooler, as you will have a lot more than 12 pieces of walls by the end. 👍

⚔️The Dispatch action send wolfs to your fellow players. After all, the best defense is if your fellow pigs are under siege. 😈

🧉With the Defense action you can pour hot soup on the wolves outside your walls to fend them off.

Your player board is split up into 3 sections, which is important, as actions and village upgrades mostly only activate in their own region. ☝️ This is a central piece of the gameplay, as you can’t just haphazardly put walls together and hope to win. 

At the end of each Age you might get some point penalties if ranged wolves are still lingering around, and at the very end you have to defend against all of the horde by having higher walls than their numbers. After the final scoring, there will be only one victorious pig! 🏆

💭Castle Raisers is a quick and fun puzzle with an endearing theme that really shines. The vertical tile-laying feels fresh and gives your fortress a fun 3D presence. 😊There are a few ambiguities in the rules of the first printing, but the BGG forums already got you covered.