The Castles of Tuscany

EvEvanstar0.9

On your turn you either draw cards, take a tile from the display and add it to your storage, or play 2 cards matching the color of a tile in your storage to place it onto your board in a matching space, connected to tiles previously placed. Each color tile comes with a small reward that can be augmented by tech tiles granted for playing red tiles. The tile rewards come in the flavors of drawing extra cards with the draw action, getting a few extra points if tile illustrations line up, getting rock tokens that give you extra actions when spent, orange workers who are spent as wild cards for tile placements, drawing three cards or getting extra random effects when you flip cards from the random effects deck. The primary focus of the game is trying to complete regions as quickly as possible. There are two types of points, green and red. Green represent points income that you bank into red points each of the three scoring phases. Completing a region on your board is the primary way to get green points, with more points depending on how large the region is. Even more green points go to the player who completes all hexes of a specific tile color. All this is well and good except the process of play is nothing but frustration. There are too many different types of cards to reliably have a set of 2 when you need it, even if you push into drawing more cards as a strategy. You can spend a pair as if it were wild, but this is like losing an entire action in a game where you are racing for firsties bonuses. Even having the cards you need doesn't mean the tiles of the color you want are available. Even having the tile become available for you doesn't mean you have room to store it. Even having room to store the tile doesn't mean you have a legal placement for it based on your previous tile placements. Additional frustration because before the game starts you build your board to create up to 2 sets of 3-hex regions, essentially establishing your primary scoring criteria which the flow of all these things then denies you. If a player gets more tiles out faster, they control when the scoring phase triggers, which creates a major rich get richer situation, as you cans stand to not benefit from 1 or 2 thirds the points you had lined yourself up for, simply from the randomness of the game punishing you harder. ☆ Art, Iconography and components functional ☆ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ☆ Multiple plays stay interesting ☆ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment

Daniel García Cruzstar5.0

De lo más mediocre que he jugado de Feld, me apena porque le tenia muchas ganas y es un gran diseñador de juegos. Este lo ha querido hacer tan light y no le llega a la suela de las botas a su afamado Castillos de Borgoña. Feld... puedes hacerlo mucho mejor y despide a tu equipo de asesores.