Castellans is a standalone game set in the Valerian universe depicted within a series of games from Daily Magic Games. In Castellans, designed by Isaias Vallejo with art by Mihajlo Dimitrievski, the players are competing over five rounds to be selected as the next Castellan of the city by managing resources, placing buildings out in the city's six districts, recruiting citizens to upgrade your actions and advancing in the city's four guilds. The game takes 2-5 players but there's also a solitaire mode.
In the first instance this is a dice drafting game using customised six-sided dice. Players draft three dice each round to determine the initial benefits they receive for the round (a specific resource or advancement on a guild track) but the dice may also give you bonuses when taking actions on your player board. Your three subsequent actions each round involve spending resources - wood, stone, food, magic (a wild resource) and/or gold - to place out one of various buildings, meeples or ships. At the end of a round, certain districts will score for area control according to the various buildings placed there. Tho' there are other ways to score, including for being furthest advanced in each guild at the end of round 5, you'll find that it's the area control points over the five rounds that primarily determine the winner.
Castellans is a medium-weight eurogame that you can expect to play in around 90 minutes. Whenever you place out a building or recruit a citizen card you are essentially adding to your engine, potentially increasing the effectiveness of subsequent actions. Most scoring is relative to other players so the game is certainly interactive but you're competing for primacy rather than attacking other players or sabotaging their engines so this doesn't feel like a 'take that' game. The cost of each building is increased for each similar building already in a district and certain buildings - particularly your monuments - can only be built in a district that doesn't already have one... When you place out monuments they score every round in relation to all of the qualifying pieces in that district regardless of the ownership of those pieces, so there can sometimes be a race to be the player who places out a monument to cash in on buildings or meeples already in that district, or indeed to discourage an opponent from subsequently putting a building there because it will mean handing you points.
The elegant design and relatively straightforward iconography in Castellans makes it a very accessible eurogame that's easy to teach and learn. It's made us all the more eager to visit some of the other delights of Valeria in Daily Magic's previous releases!