Dragon Castle

EvEvanstar4,6

This is a game inspired by those pretty looking but very bleah playing solitaire mahjong games. You start off with this mound of faceup tiles, and on your turn you remove one tile from the highest level, then you can chose to chump it for a point, take a roof token, or take an accessible matching tile from any level of the structure. The game part of the game is what you do next. Each player has a player board, where you put the tiles you took. When a contiguous blob of the same suite of tiles reaches 4 or more, it scores, and the larger the blob the better the payout. After the payout, the tiles flip face down, and can be placed on top of with future tile pulls. The roof pieces can be placed on these stacks to earn some bonus points. This puzzle is pleasant, but relatively simple, so the game then adds one random card from a deck of special abilities everyone can access, and one extra endgame scoring criteria. The game is very light. Maybe a little too light for me with 4 players, where there are enough tiles being taken that generally what you need to have happen will happen. I'm interested to see this with fewer players to get a sense of what it's like when you are really playing chicken with your opponents in terms of getting what you want from the tower vs denying your opponents access to what they need. That being said, what I wanted from this game was a multiplayer more interesting version of solitaire mahjong, and I do think it does deliver on that front. ★ 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

MeMestremutenstar5,0

Rating: 3/5 Production value: 2/4 Is the game in my collection/Love to have?: 0/1

Benjamín Amorínstar7,0

Cool abstract game that reminds a bit at Mahjong but on a really different style. On the same way I prefere Azul, but it's very good as well.