by goosarino
Aaah, the smell of freshly cut grass, the tonk of mallet on ball and the taste of a crisp, vinegary cucumber sandwich. All yours to enjoy as you turn your eyes away from the croquet match on the lawn and look across the veranda to where the children play quietly with their toy soldiers and dollies.Such genteel refinement. As the warm sunshine caresses your face, you finish your sandwich and wash it down with a swig of Pimms. A sigh of contentment passes your lips as you tilt down the straw boater to better shield your eyes from the sun, and prepare for a dignified afternoon nap… tonksquelch…
But what’s that you hear?
Opening your eyes you see that Auntie Agatha seems to be bludgeoning Reverand Parsons to death with her croquet mallet, you begin to rise… but before making it to your feet little Edmond is on you. His arms snake around your throat, weighing you down. Meanwhile sweet Henrietta, having abandoned her dollies, waddles toward you, revving up a chainsaw.
Where did she get a chainsaw?
And that, minus the chainsaw, is a little bit like playing Castles of Burgundy.
Except it’s not like that at all. At least, not all the time. If I apologise for both the very silly preamble, and being rather more than fashionably late to this particular party, would you allow me to elaborate?
In Castles of Burgundy each player takes the role of Burgundian nobles trying to earn victory points by collecting the most efficacious combinations of tiles from a central depot board to add to their individual estate boards. Just like they did in the 1500s, right? This is done using a pair of dice for each player, which everyone rolls simultaneously, giving whoever goes first the early pickings of the board, but awarding the later players both thinking time and an idea of what the leader is up to. You win points for filling the coloured regions of your board, the sooner you do so the more valuable this is, as well as selling goods, hoarding silver, farming and owning certain buildings.
For instance, with a four and a five, I could grab a church from depot number four and put it in my building queue, and use the five to place a ship from my queue into the river on an empty space with a number five printed on it. The ship moves me forward on the turn track and allows me to claim goods, which I can sell for silver and points, and if I can get the church into a city tile next turn it gives me a free grab at a mine, castle or technology tile.
Alternatively, I could use the four to sell any goods of that number I already own, and sacrifice the other die to gain two worker tokens that allow me to modify any future dice rolls by one point each.
And that, over five turns of five phases each, is the game. Simple as. You rolls your dice, you takes your choice: Take a tile, place a tile, sell, or recruit workers.
This dear reader, is the source of a great Lie I have told. Having read many good things about this game myself, I bought a copy, but nobody would play me. They wouldn’t admit it, for fear of looking shallow, but I think the box art may have put them off. In fairness, it ain’t great.
To try to win them round, I told The Lie. And The Lie was this:
“It’s probably the simplest game I own.”
“It’s probably the simplest game I own”
This is emphatically not the case.
Eventually Carcassonne Bob relented. He’ll play anything set in Southern France.
Now, as that Alec Guinness-looking chap once said, “A great many things you hold to be true in fact depend upon your point of view”. I said it above, you get to do two of four possible options each turn. Take, place, sell, recruit. But as you may have gathered from my little scenario up there, different tiles have different effects on your game, making some choices more attractive than others, changing your plans. Assuming of course another player doesn’t have the same plans (or is just being a dick) and is taking all the tiles you need…
…and there are eight different kinds buldings that let you take additional actions, I’ve barely mentioned the technology tiles which bestow lasting bonuses that can make drastically altering strategy mid-game suddenly seem very attractive. Playing any of these into your estate creates more options and pssible moves, from which, in turn, spin off whole trees, no, forests, of strategic options for your next move.
While you may start a game of Castles of Burgundy just snaffling up tiles here and there, womble-like, to use as best you can, very soon a plan will present itself to your frontal lobes. Very soon, you’ll realise that if you use that six to a to place that castle from your build queue, earning you a reroll which you can modify with a worker, enabling you to sell your goods so you can earn enough silver to buy from the middle stack that technology tile which you can place immediately with your other die that turns your thus-far jumbled efforts at farming into an agricultural gold-mine of diversity while your opponents stare agog at your intellectual acrobatics…
Breathe…
And it feels goooood.
I think it would be a bit of a fib to call Castles of Burgundy an exciting game, in the sense that Ghost Stories or Condottiere can be. But it is an immensely satisfying one. It’s a huge ham and cheese toasty for your brain, really giving your mental faculties something to chew over and digest. It’s not an edge-of-the-seat experience, rather a bout of mental gymnastics. If you beat somebody at Castles of Burgundy you can be pretty sure it’s because you outthought them.
To be honest, I’ve barely scratched the surface of this game. If I’ve tried (and failed) to get anything across here, it’s that you can almost feel the options, the strategies, writhing beneath the placid surface and precise mechanisms of this thing as you play it. Imagine skating across a tranquil frozen lake, but being able to sense a terrible, squamous, thrashing something flailng beneath the ice, out of sight but undeniably present. Not chaotic, but preternaturally powerful.
This is one of those games you’ll want to play again and again, to learn, to improve. You’ll mull over you’re actions in the last game you played, working out what happened and why, trying to pinpoint the moment you went wrong, or, more likely, the moment your opponent went spectacularly right.
Your brain will stew all this down, whether you like it or not, to try and ensure next time results in victory. Next time you’ll play that bit wiser. And one day, maybe one day, even tame those Lovecraftian Depths and make them your bitch- in doing so playing the perfect game, becoming unstoppable. If you do that, you can accomplish anything.
Oh, and Bob? Loved it.
Once I’d put down the chainsaw.