Castles of Burgundy

There’s a joke in hobbyist board gaming circles: if you can win a game through approximately seventeen different scoring categories and you’re never quite sure which one actually mattered, you’re probably playing a Stefan Feld game. The joke has teeth - but it undersells what Feld actually does. The German designer has been publishing complex Euro games since the mid-2000s, and in that time he’s built one of the most recognisable design signatures in the hobby. Intricate mechanisms, historical European backdrops, dice that actually make decisions interesting, and - yes - multiple overlapping scoring paths that reward players who can hold several plans in their heads at once. ...

Your first game of The Castles of Burgundy probably felt like this: you stared at a player board covered in coloured hexes and tiny symbols you couldn’t read without squinting, someone spent ten minutes explaining what silvers do, you placed tiles in the wrong regions twice, you lost track of what your dice were even supposed to accomplish, and when scoring came around, someone had quietly built an enormous ship empire while you were busy decoding the iconography. ...