Castles of Tuscany
Feb. 24th, 2025 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearYesterday, we spent the day in Marlow at a special charity-based Handycon games convention.
In the early evening, I was introduced to Castles of Tuscany, which is a variation on one of my favourite board games - Castles of Burgundy.
It's a smaller game, in both scope, time and physical components, but it still has quite a lot of strategic complexity to make it interesting. It's all about placing different coloured tiles on your game board (just like Castles of Burgundy) but the focus is on generating 'green' points (which score every era) rather than 'red' points that only score once.
There are, as ever with these games, many choices to be made at every turn. However, the game also restricts you in terms of what tiles are available and what cards you have in your hand at any given time. I like this in a game, because I like to play each turn to maximise what I can do in that moment, based on the state of the game board, rather than making complex, multi-turn plans that can easily be derailed.
It felt like I wasn't doing very well to begin with, but my understanding of the game and my overall plans really started coming together in the second half. There were a tense few rounds where I did end up with a complex, multi-turn plan and I wasn't sure if I would have enough turns to implement it. But it all worked out - and I ended up losing on a tie breaker to a much more experienced player, which was pretty satisfying!
This is a great alternative to Castles of Burgundy if you don't have the time or the space for that. Very interesting, and I'd definitely like to play it again.
In the early evening, I was introduced to Castles of Tuscany, which is a variation on one of my favourite board games - Castles of Burgundy.
It's a smaller game, in both scope, time and physical components, but it still has quite a lot of strategic complexity to make it interesting. It's all about placing different coloured tiles on your game board (just like Castles of Burgundy) but the focus is on generating 'green' points (which score every era) rather than 'red' points that only score once.
There are, as ever with these games, many choices to be made at every turn. However, the game also restricts you in terms of what tiles are available and what cards you have in your hand at any given time. I like this in a game, because I like to play each turn to maximise what I can do in that moment, based on the state of the game board, rather than making complex, multi-turn plans that can easily be derailed.
It felt like I wasn't doing very well to begin with, but my understanding of the game and my overall plans really started coming together in the second half. There were a tense few rounds where I did end up with a complex, multi-turn plan and I wasn't sure if I would have enough turns to implement it. But it all worked out - and I ended up losing on a tie breaker to a much more experienced player, which was pretty satisfying!
This is a great alternative to Castles of Burgundy if you don't have the time or the space for that. Very interesting, and I'd definitely like to play it again.
