Cudillero
- Board's Eye View
- Jan 28
- 2 min read
Designed and illustrated by Jorge Tabanero Redondo and published by TCG Factory, Cudillero is a neat tableau building game that was one of the hidden gems we discovered at Spiel Essen 2024.
The 2-4 players are building a terrace of multi-storey houses by drafting 'doorway' (ground floor), floor and roof cards from a market display. Drafted cards tho' usually go to your hand and you ordinarily have to take a build action to add a card to your tableau. Players have individual decks of 18 numbered action cards from which you will usually have a hand of five cards. From these, you choose one to play for its actions and two to bid. The player that wins the bid gets to take the two actions on their action card with all other players just taking one of the actions on their card. There are three possible actions: Buy lets you take a card from the market to add to your hand, Build lets you play a card from your hand to your tableau, and Value lets you increase or decrease the value of a colour. The game comprises three 'days' each of six rounds of bidding, so you can expect games to run to 40-60 minutes, depending on player count.
Ultimately of course you will score for the cards you've built in your tableau. You score for the height of each building, the length of connected optical fibre on the cards in your tableau and the largest runs of orthogonally adjacent colours, with the latter multiplied by the colour's Value at the end of the game. In addition, you score bonus points for each balcony, window, person and chimney, and roof cards will have multipliers on them that may increase the value of these, so may direct your strategy over which floor cards to Buy and Build in your tableau.
There's more. Single-use bonus tokens can be used to add to the value of your bid, to take extra turn actions on the card you've played and to relocate orthogonally adjacent cards in your tableau. Also you'll play each game with one of ten 'Common Objectives', most of which give a 10 point reward to the first player who completes its requirement. In addition, there's the option to play with Personal Objective cards and/or with a variant rule that gives a player a free Buy & Build action if they raise the Value of a colour to 6. Again, these are all likely to direct players' strategies.
Cudillero is easy to teach and learn so it's very playable as a family game but there's still enough depth over the choice and timing of actions to engage more hardened gamers.