The Castles of Burgundy First Impressions

Yay, I finally get to play The Castles of Burgundy…

But has it already been superseded by another Feld game?

The game is set in the Burgundy region of High Medieval France. Each player takes on the role of an aristocrat, originally controlling a small princedom. While playing they aim to build settlements and powerful castles, practice trade along the river, exploit silver mines, and use the knowledge of travellers.

This is a very simple game of rolling dice and using them to gain tiles. Then place them into your play area. There are different actions to take, different tiles to place and different abilities triggering from placing those tiles.

Firstly, everything you do is based on your play area…

The Game

This is after a few rounds on my board. It’s made up of different areas grouped by colour relating to the type of building you can put there. Each space also shows you a number which means you need that number on one of your dice to place a building in that space.

Don’t worry though, you can get a worker (we called them workers, I think they’re supposed to be a ‘passing traveller’?) token that gives +/- 1 to a die. These are very useful and worth spending your limited actions to get them if you need them… Actually, it’s a great action to take when you have a spare floating die and you’re unsure what to do with it, which can happen.

Actions

What other actions can you take? Well, they’re all in the bottom right-hand corner of your play board… I LOVE that in a game.

You can use a die to place an unplaced tile in your play area onto your map. Like I said you need to have the right number on the die but you also need to put it in the right colour area AND adjacent to a tile you’ve already placed.

That takes planning.

You can use a die to pick up a tile from the main board, so let’s take a look at that now…

It’s a bit of a mess but it makes sense once you start playing.

The mass of large squares with 4 tiles assigned to each is where you buy your tiles from. You need a dice of that number to take one from the relevant place and put it on your player board ready to place in your city.

There’s a bit more to it than that but I think you get the point of it now, right?

The Castles of Burgundy Summary

I enjoyed it quite a bit and I will DEFINITELY play it again. I went for animals and castles which give points and extra actions respectively so next time I’ll try something different.

The ONLY issue I have with the game is Bora Bora. Same designer, a similar-ish dice placement system but overall a better game and nicer looking.

I said Bora Bora has replaced Kingsburg for me which is a game I REALLY like so putting The Castles of Burgundy under Bora Bora in my rankings is not a big deal.

So to sum up, The Castles of Burgundy is a very nice game I WILL play again.

Jesta ThaRogue