Designer: Stefan Feld

You are a merchant prince of Burgundy, and you seek to build up the family estate. Seek to flesh it out with pastures, castles, harbors, and… er, fields of knowledge. Or something.

Castles of Burgundy takes place over 25 turns, broken into 5 equally long phase. On each turn, players will roll two dice, then use those two dice to perform one of a small handful of possible actions: trade, hire workers, start construction, or finish a construction. When a new tile is constructed, it becomes a new hex and is added to their estate, at which point it is scored and, in many cases, fires off new mechanics.

Interesting Mechanic: A Euro with Dice. There was a time that most eurogames disdained dice, as the randomness of the dice simply undercut the value of the player’s tactical decisions. Particularly disdained was the idea dice being used as a chance for failure – i.e. high dice ‘hitting’ and low dice ‘missing’. Castles of Burgundy makes it work by having dice, but also by making their values relatively unimportant. Mathematically, whether you need a six or a two has nothing to do with which number is higher, and instead is based on which number is home to a tile you want to place. The game also is very generous in giving tools to manipulate those dice.

Many people consider Castles of Burgundy to be Stefan Feld’s finest game. I don’t (we’ll see him show up again later), but I do consider this to be one of his more accessible works. It’s thinky, with tons of options, and yet the dice rolling constrains the player a great deal, and helps to address the paralysis analysis that makes a lot of Euros unplayable against some people.

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(Photo Credit: Opinionated Gamers)