Coral Castle is a card drafting game for 2-5 players, designed and illustrated by Travis Deere. Over three rounds of card drafting, players end up with a hand of cards - nine in the first round but rising in rounds 2 and 3. You'll be playing the cards to advance along three tracks that will ultimately score for end-game position, as well as directly on a scoring track.
Appropriate to the theme, it's pearls that are the currency of the game. You'll collect pearls at the start of a round for any cards in your hand with a pearl showing in the top left corner. These tend to be otherwise low-value cards - advancing just one place on just one of the tracks - but many of the other more powerful cards require payment in pearls in order to play them. Other high impact cards demand that other specific card types be played with them. You're ideally then trying through your card drafting to build a hand of cards that synergise and where you have enough pearls to power them. It makes for quite a challenging drafting process, and one that most players will find more readily facilitated if they add card racks so that they can see at a glance the cards they have drafted so far. The game rules expect you to place the cards you draft in a face-down pile on your player board, tho' you're allowed to peek at them - which we found we were having to do a lot of in our plays at Board's Eye View - hence the suggestion for using card racks.
The novel element to the game is that you won't ordinarily be playing all the cards in your hand. In the first round, you ordinarily play just six of your nine cards; tho' there are some cards that allow you to play one or more additional cards. This means you can afford to take a chance in drafting a card that you may be unable to play. You get to carry a number of cards forward to the next round, and these aren't necessarily your unplayed cards, so again you're offered meaty choices for maximising your prospects of progress on the tracks. And the game incorporates alternative decks so you can up the drafting challenge by changing the card mix.
Shown here on Board's Eye View is a preview prototype of Coral Castle produced by Lime Green Games ahead of the game's launch on Kickstarter on 18 February. We expect the published version to include sea creature tokens in place of the cubes and it's due to incorporate 3D clam shells to hold players' pearls. When your token reaches 10 on any of the tracks, you mark it with a coral, planted in your player colour. These will be printed in the published version of the game.
If you enjoy card drafting games, Coral Castle is definitely worth checking out. Its depth comes from the synergies you need to build. Card counters and those with eidetic memories will want to keep track not only of their own developing hand but also those of their opponents, to whom they'll be passing cards. We found in our plays that we had enough to do to maximise our own hands but there's scope in this game for 'hate drafting' as more hard-nosed players draft cards in order to deny them to an opponent who really needs them.
We'll add a link to Coral Castle's Kickstarter campaign when it goes live.