Castle Raisers
- Board's Eye View
- Jun 19
- 2 min read
Think of WWBG's Castle Raisers as a sequel to the Three Little Pigs. In this game, designed by Le Minous Erwan and Anthony Perone, the pigs are no longer so little but the Big Bad Wolf is no longer alone... The pigs in this game are having to defend against an invading army of wolves and even a house of bricks doesn't offer sufficient protection: your pig will need to build their own castle to withstand the onslaught! The game features cute art from Zingco Kang and Yuan Momoco.
There's the option of solo and cooperative play but we've most enjoyed Castle Raisers as a 2-4 player competitive game. Played over 12 rounds, the players are each raising the walls of castles on their individual player boards. Each turn you'll be drafting a wall tile from a central display. The wall tiles show different combinations of the five icons used in the game, and it's these icons that are activated when they are covered by another wall tile. These variously earn you victory points and the first player marker, higher walls, tokens that give you more icons plus end-game scoring bonuses and fortifications which, inter alia, direct more marauding wolves against the other players - well, we warned you this was competitive mode. When you activate the boiling soup icon, you get to repel wolves massing outside your castle walls.
Once you've got your head around the rules and the way in which the wall tiles are placed and icons activated, Castle Raisers is easy to play. You very soon realise there's a strong advantage in having first pick from the wall tiles in the display and a big disadvantage in being left with Hobson's Choice, so we've found in our plays at Board's Eye View that there's often a tug of war as the first player marker gets claimed first by one player and then taken by another in the same round. As well as their impact on end-game scoring, well-positioned village tiles can multiply the effect of your icon activations, so canny players will plan and place their tiles accordingly.
We've had a lot of fun playing Castle Raisers, especially with three and four players in competitive mode. This isn't a game where players are likely to succumb to Analysis Paralysis (AP) – on your turn you're just taking and placing a tile and counting up how many matching icons there are for those that you trigger – so you can expect games to come in at under an hour - even allowing for some huffing and puffing over the end-game scoring.
