Game Review – Castle Dice

Castle Dice
Number of Players	1 - 4
Play Time	45 minutes
Ages	8 years and up

It is time to take a look at Castle Dice.  Castle dice is a 1 – 4 player resource management game.  Some people think of it as a worker placement game but while worker placement does play a role in the game, proper resource management is the path to victory in Castle Dice.

The theme to Castle Dice is the players are medieval nobles that are assigned by their lord to build a castle on the border to defend against barbarians.  The person who can build the best castle will win the game and become heir to the throne.  In order to be able to build the best castle you need to get the right resources in order to recruit workers to build manage your lands while suing those same resources the build your castle.

A game turn is fairly simple.  First the players draw cards from the worker and building deck until they have five cards in their hand.   These are what they have the opportunity to build during their turn, if it is not in their hand, it cannot be built or recruited.  The players then each get a fixed set of dice plus up to three additional dice of their choice.  The players roll their dice keep any dice that come up as barbarians and put the rest in the center of the table.   The faces on the dice are the resources that the dice represent, animals, and a barbarian.  The players start going around the table recruiting dice and adding them to their resources one by one until the pool of dice is depleted.

At this point the players make any resource adjustments for their workers and then build more workers and buildings from their hand.  The barbarians attack taking 1 of each resource from the player’s pool for each barbarian that they rolled earlier in the turn.  When they complete this, first player for the next turn is determined by who has the most horses.

The reason that I consider this a resource management game instead of a worker placement game is that the players may on choose to build workers that they want to from their resources.  They may only build items that they currently have in their hand.  So even if they had the resources to build a certain worker, they could not build the type of worker they wanted unless they had a card with it.  Having certain types of workers do provide an advantage but having the correct resources are what will help you win the game.

I found the game to be fun for a lighter game.  While the artwork in the game is more on the cartoony side, which leads you to believe that it is a super light kids game there is a definitely enough there to entertain a group of adults.  There is too much randomness in the game with the card drawing to see what can be guilt and the dice themselves for the game to be considered anything but light.  The name of the game should be enough to warn off players that like to keep the amount of random chance down to a minimum.  Even then the game takes around an hour to play so you do not get stuck in it forever.

This is a good game to use to introduce players to board games.  It is fast paced so you are not having to wait long for the turn to come around to you and there is enough there to keep even the most experienced player from getting bored with it.