The Castles of Burgundy
Description
Build settlements, sail and exploit mines to dominate French Burgundy! The Castles of Burgundy is Stefan Feld's quintessential Eurogame, a dice and tile-placing game that forces you to minimize chance and maximize synergies. Players roll two dice and use them to perform actions: obtain tiles from a warehouse, place them on their personal board (a ducat), or sell goods. The genius of Burgundy is how the dice simply restrict your options, but your personal board allows you to mitigate, change, and improve those numbers. The goal is to fill your personal dukedom, which is segmented into 6 types of hexes (castles, ships, pastures, mines, buildings, knowledge). Placing adjacent tiles of the same color and completing regions gives you crucial victory points and bonuses. Engine building is successfully developed through knowledge (technology) tiles, which give you permanent rules. If you are a strategist who loves optimizing resources, mitigating luck and creating complex chains of points, this is the Eurogame for you. Despite its functional art, the depth of its gameplay has made it an essential classic of the hobby. Take advantage of the dice roll and colonize your duchy!
As Amazon affiliates, we earn from qualifying purchases.
How to play
On your turn, you roll 2 dice and can use each one once to perform an action, which must match the value of the die: 1. Get Tile: You take a tile from a deposit whose number matches the die. 2. Place Tile: You place a tile from your storage in your duchy, in a region whose number matches the die. 3. Sell Goods: You sell all your goods of a single type for money. 4. Take Workers: You take two worker tokens (which allow you to modify the value of the dice). Victory points are awarded for completing regions, selling goods, and for building bonuses. The game is divided into 5 phases, each with 5 rounds. The player with the most VP at the end wins.
Why you might like it
The dice system is ingenious (the dice restrict but do not dominate the game), High synergy between the 6 types of scoring tiles, Satisfaction of completing large regions of color in your dukedom. If you like deep eurogames where chance can be controlled and every decision counts to build great combinations of points, The Castles of Burgundy is an essential reference.
What to keep in mind
The aesthetic is remarkably simple and the art is functional, It has no direct conflict or significant negative interaction, It may be susceptible to analysis paralysis due to the number of optimal options.