Castle Up
- Board's Eye View
- 23 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Designed by Marti and Oriol Granduxe, with art by Vitaliy Sandula, Wolley Games' Castle Up is a card game where the players are building their cities and seeking dominance by attacking rival cities to demolish their buildings. It's a drafting card game where players will be trying to build to their tableaus by purchasing cards from a central display by paying the resource cost of the card/building they are seeking to draft. The cards in your display will typically generate resources, so Castle Up is an engine-building game, with cards tapped when they are used on your turn.
A turn will give you one prospective purchase action and one battle action (using cards in your tableau with an attack symbol to attack a specific building in an opponent's tableau). You can use your purchase action to 'refurbish' an existing building in your tableau, which means discarding one or more buildings and offsetting their resource costs against the resource cost of the building you are purchasing. You're quite likely to want and need to do this during the game because you can never have more than six buildings in your tableau in addition to your castle. If a building in your tableau has an upgrade icon then it can be promoted to its upgraded version for free, provided another player doesn't nab that card first. Finally, you can use a purchase action to purchase one of the four special action cards that are available at the start of each round.
In addition to giving you resources, cards in your tableau may let you take extra purchase or battle actions over and above the basic one of each you get each turn. You have the option too to play with identical castles (players' impregnable starting building) or with castles with asymmetric attributes.
When you attack a building in another player's tableau, you tot up your attack icons and compare that with your opponent's defence icons. If a building's defence value is exceeded, the building is 'damaged' (flipped to its black & white side). It will cost 1 gold to repair it. If a damaged building is successfully attacked a second time, or if the superiority of the original attack was at least double that of the building's defences, the building is destroyed.
Resource management is crucial in the game but the refurbishment option means that every building in your tableau retains a strong trade-in value; tho' that's halved for buildings that are flipped to their damaged side. Gold is a wild resource but it's painful having to use gold as another resource because it costs three of another resource to buy one gold. Rather than using it as a wild, you'll ideally want to keep gold on hand so that you can effect repairs to damaged buildings.
The game runs until the building cards deck is exhausted. At that point, the win goes to the player whose tableau has the highest points value, counting only undamaged buildings. There are set collection bonuses for having the most of each building type. It's a to and fro challenge where players will be trying to optimise their engine-building while looking to defend and lob attacks against the other players. Tho' it's playable with three or four players, it's primarily a two-player dueller. If you play with more than two, the rules suggest you should normally only be able to attack the player to your left. This works to prevent players from just ganging up on one player to take them out of the game but we still preferred Castle Up as a two-player game, not least because you really need to be able to keep track of the state of each others' tableaus and resources, and that's a more manageable prospect if there are just two of you.
At Board's Eye View, most of our two-player games of Castle Up have come in at 45-60 minutes. As you increasingly become able to take multiple actions, turns become longer but rounds are still quite quick because cards in the market display aren't replenished until the end of a round. It can be definitely be advantageous to have first pick at the market, so turn order can be important. You have the option to claim the 'Take the Initiative' action card but that's at the cost of a purchase action - so possibly a whole turn - and at least one resource. It's refreshing tho' to have a duelling game where there is no luck factor in determining combat. In this game, success or failure depends not on luck but on the tactical decision players take over the buildings/cards they target for attack and the effective deployment of defences and repairs.
