Castle Combo Review

boardgamequest.com:

I first came across Castle Combo, the 2-5 player tableau-building game by Grégory Grard and Mathieu Roussel and published by Pandasaurus Games, on Board Game Arena, the online board gaming platform. Although it wasn’t the first time I had seen it done, it was the first time I chose to engage with a game I hadn’t heard of being previewed there before its physical release at Essen.

I decided to give it a try and, luckily, I have a group of unfussy friends that I can invite to play any BGA game, even if they don’t know the rules, and they’ll quickly learn it and join in. What began on a whim turned out to be my favorite light filler 2-player game of the year.

Castle Combo’s gameplay is quite simple. In essence, you are gaining a card each turn to add to what will ultimately be a 3×3 card tableau. These are the actions one takes on their turn:

I’ll come back to #1 momentarily. The main action of a player’s turn is that they can either buy a card for the price listed in the top left corner and gain the benefits of the card, both instant (gain resources) and end-game (points), or choose to not pay and flip the card over, still using up a space in their tableau, but instead only gaining six coins and two keys.

Cards are split between two different deck types, castle and village. Each deck has a different distribution of card factions, represented by six different shields, and each deck of cards will always reveal a row of three face-up cards to choose from. The player may only select a card from a given row if the messenger is present.

Prior to selecting a card, the player may spend a key to do one of two actions: refresh the row where the messenger is with three new cards, or move the messenger to the other row. This can only be done once. After that, the player must select a card, which means each player will have nine turns before their tableau is completed.

Cards score in different ways, some giving points for a particular representation of shields, either within a