Castle Combo

• Designer: Gregory Grard and Mathieu Roussel
• Publisher: Pandasaurus / Catch Up Games 
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 10+
• Time: 25 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4fhYyDP 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

A quick and nifty card game by the publisher of Faraway, Castle Combo is a tableau-building game that combines simplicity with deep, engaging gameplay, offering highly satisfying experiences.  Balancing your Gold reserves is equally important, ensuring you can afford the characters that best suit your strategy throughout the game. 

Selecting the right characters is crucial to maximising their immediate effects and the points they will contribute at the game’s end. Finally, carefully arranging these characters on your 3×3 board is key to unlocking their full potential.

Each turn, you add a character to your tableau—a seemingly straightforward action that packs a punch regarding strategic decisions. You’ll need to carefully manage your Keys to influence the Messenger pawn at critical moments, as it controls which characters are available for recruitment from two different areas – peasants and nobles.

There are two decks in the game, a gray Castle deck and a brown Village deck. Shuffle each separately. Place them on the table and then reveal 3 from each deck to form a market for each.  Players start with 2 Keys and 15 Gold. 

On a turn, there are four phases that a player goes through, and then the next player goes.  The game continues until everyone has 9 cards in their area, in a 3×3 grid.

1] Optionally, spend a key – if you do so you can either move the Messenger pawn to the other line OR discard all three cards in the Messenger’s current location and deal out three new cards

2] Buy a card – You must take a card from the row where the Messenger is.  Pay the cost as shown in the upper left and be sure to take into account any discounts provided by cards in your tableau.  Alternatively, you can choose to not buy a card, but instead place it face down in your display – you will not get any abilities or end game points from it, but you will get 6 gold and 2 keys.  The card you place must be orthogonally adjacent to a previously placed card and it should not exceed a 3×3 grid size.

3] Apply the new card’s ability – if you purchased a card, apply the ability of the card (the text just under the illustration).  It gives you things based on your own tableau or neighbors/opponents.  It takes itself into account when scoring.

4] Move the Messenger pawn and refill the display – If there is a messenger icon under the price of the card bought, move the messenger to the other row.  Refill the display so that there are 3 cards in each row.

At the end of the game, players place leftover coins on any cards with purse scoring abilities. Each purse can hold as much gold as the number printed on the bag.  Use the scoring pad to score each of the 9 cards in the grid.  Finally, each leftover key is worth 1 point.  The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the most leftover Gold.

My thoughts on the game

Faraway was one of the big hits from Spiel 2023, so when I heard that Catch Up / Pandasaurus were touting a similar game for this year, I was quick to check it out.  I got a nice demo at the booth at Spiel and a friend picked up a copy so we played it a few times in the hotel there.  My English copy from Pandasaurus just arrived, and it was not long before we had it on the table again.

Castle Combo hits a sweet spot for me – there are only 9 turns in the game, and as a result, the game time is always short.  That being said, there are a number of things to consider with each of the card drafting decisions.   Trying to figure out which is the best card to buy is a multi-leveled decision.  First, can you afford the card you want?  Then, what about its scoring rule – can you generate enough points from it?  Third, how will this card work with the already drafted cards and scoring rules in your array?  Fourth, does it matter whether the Messenger moves or not?  Fifth, where are you going to put this card in the array – will it affect other cards or change your placement options of other cards?

Yeah, that feels like a lot to process; and to some degree you will consider some or all of these things – but each turn will still take under a minute, and before you know it, your array of cards is well on its way to being completed.  

Each of the cards has its own scoring rule, and as a result, it’s really hard to go into the game with a set strategy.  You’ll never be sure what cards will be available on any given turn, so you’ll always have to be watching over your options to try to discover what is best.  As you get more familiar with the cards, you might also be able to take more speculative card buys – hoping that a particular card will show up in the future…

The one thing that I’d recommend is leaving the back page of the rulebook available for everyone to see.  There is no player aid, but I have found it helpful to look at the chart that delineates how many of each color shield is found in the village deck versus the castle deck.  Near the end of the game, players may want to refresh the market as they look for a particular attribute – and it’s helpful to know what your odds are of finding a particular color of shield.

The icons are quite easy to understand; and since all the cards are face up all the time, it’s easy enough for players to ask questions if there is something they don’t grok.  The art of the cards is quite delightful, with a cartoon-y representation of the characters and buildings.  The only component issue that we’ve come across is that there are sometimes not quite enough  coins in a max 5p game, especially if players have triggered abilities that let them place coins onto cards during play.  But, it’s easy enough to find substitutes, so no big deal.

Castle Combo gives you a pleasing puzzle in a 15 to 20 minute time frame.  I have found that it plays just fine at all player counts from 2 to 5.  You get a bit more planning with lower player counts, as it’s more likely that you can leave a card in the market and come back to it on a later turn… But, in the end, each time your turn comes up, you always have to simply examine the cards available to you and figure out which will combo the best with the cards you already have.

I’m close to a dozen plays now, and I foresee this hitting the table a lot over the rest of the holiday season.

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4fhYyDP 

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Joe Huber (1 play): for me, this game just fell flat.  I did things because the game said I needed to do things, without any clear idea as to why one choice was more valuable than another thematically.  There’s nothing wrong with the game, it just feels much too abstract to me.

Alan How: (4 plays) Loads of variety and it’s such a quick game. At my last game session, two of the other three players went on the net at the end of the game to buy a copy. It was such good fun. There’s enough to think about but not too much to trouble your brain and when you’ve played a few times you start to look for combinations of cards that might yield good scores. It joins the growing list of quick tableau builders released in the last year or so that are worth playing as an end of evening game. 

Alison Brennan: Draft a card, place it in your personal 3×3 grid. Each card provides an immediate effect (get money or discounts) and an end-game score effect. After everyone’s played 9, score your cards in the usual manner (having icons, adjacencies, locations, etc). Some spice has been added by having 2 drafts that provide an extra decision on whether to spend a VP to move to the other draft or to scrap the lot in the current draft and hope for better, and you’re often choosing between good-now and good-later effects. These decisions keep you invested in the result but, as usual for the genre, it gives you the out of blaming bad drafts.

Dan B. (1 play): I thought it was fine for the very short length but it didn’t do a lot for me. I found Faraway a lot more interesting; the structure of that game provides tension between the different things you are trying to do (get your early cards to score well, get some kind of scoring for later cards, and get sanctuaries) that I just didn’t feel here – the choices felt very flat by comparison.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Dale Y
• I like it. Alison
• Neutral. John P, Dan B.
• Not for me… Joe H.