Released at Spiel Essen 2024, Castle Builder is a light family-friendly 2-4 player tile-placement tableau building game from FryxGames. It's designed by Daniel Fryxelius with attractive art by Naomi Fryxelius. And you're not just construction a castle tableau; there's some actual building work required at the outset to assemble the fortification-style tile rack that each player has to accommodate their hand of tiles.
Each turn you either draw two tiles from the face-down pile and add them to your rack or you place a tile from your rack or from the market (three face-up tiles on the board) to add to your castle. At the heart of the game then are the placement rules. Tho' you can place any tile in the first level of your castle construction, any tiles placed on subsequent levels must match the number of the two tiles immediately beneath them. This means some basic arithmetic, giving the game an educational element for younger players. You can discard a tile to adjust by one the number of the tile you place (for example, allowing 11 to satisfy a required value 12 or 10) and there's an optional rule that extends this so that you can discard any number of tiles to amend the requirement by an equivalent number; so by discarding four tiles you could play a value 9 tile to a location that requires a 13 point tile. From our plays at Board's Eye View we would recommend always playing with this optional rule. There are a number of tiles that bear a tick at the bottom rather than a numerical value. These can be placed anywhere but most of them also have 'air' above them, and another restriction is that you cannot build on top of air - so tiles with air mostly limit your future placements.
As you might expect from the name of the game, you're mostly building your castle but you're actually only doing so to advance your meeple on a track that ultimately lets you collect coins, because the win goes to the first player to collect seven coins. You don't advance on the track at all for tiles placed on the first level but for each space above that you move the number of spaces equal to the level at which you place your tile; so a tile placed on the second level moves your meeple two spaces. If the tile has rubies on it, you move an additional space for each ruby.
There's more, in that the coins all have special effects or rewards on one side, and the coin you take is selected from a face-up display of three. The icongraphy on the coins isn't entirely self-explanatory so you'll probably need to refer to the back page of the rulebook to decipher each of the effects. A couple involve stealing tiles or knocking a previously placed tile off from your own or an opponent's castle but most reward with an extra tile draw the player whose castle has the most of a particular characteristic; for example, the most windows. It can be mildly irksome having to take a reward that gives a benefit to another player but ultimately it's all about generating the movement that lets you collect coins ahead of the other players.
Aside from some coin effects, Castle Builder isn't a game with a lot of player interaction so it will particularly appeal to players who like to be able to focus on their own castle without having to mither overly about what others are doing. Tho' the arithmetical demands are basic, the placement rules make for a mostly satisfying tho' occasionally frustrating puzzle optimisation game. Players will find it frustrating to discover the tiles they've placed offer them few options for further builds, either because they've made the rookie error of putting high values on their bottom row or because they've placed out a plethora of tiles with turrets or with air on one side. These tend to be first-play errors that you won't repeat on subsequent plays.