Page 34 - spielbox_0717_EN

REVIEW
Dragon Castle
Deceiving Look
If you want to believe the bottom of the box, Dragon Castle was inspired by the traditional Chinese game of Mah-Jongg. This might well be the case. But apart from the tiles with their oriental ornaments and the fact that these are initially stacked on top of each other, the only contents the
two have in common is victory point collection.
In Mah-Jongg, players endeavor to score points by placing groups of tiles, which they take from their starting
hand or draw face-down from a stack shaped like a wall. These tiles are initially hidden from the other players, as every- one attempts to end the game by being the first to get rid of all of their own tiles. By contrast, in Dragon Castle you start without tiles and focus on picking the right ones from the central supply. These
overall layout. At the beginning of each turn you take a tile from the topmost level. Only then are you allowed to take a
second tile from
a level of your
choice, pro-
vided it shows
exactly the same symbol as
the first tile and is accessible by its long side.
All tiles need to be immediately placed on your own board. Initially only on empty spaces, but later also on top of other tiles that were flipped over in previ-
ous moves and now show their blank flip sides. Flipping tiles over becomes man- datory as soon as four tiles of the same kind are orthogonally adjacent. Which means that unlike during the pick-up phase they do not have to be identical,
but merely part of the same, similar- ly-designed color group, of which the game contains six.
I Try for six tiles minimum However, apart from in the end run nobody will be content with a group of only four tiles, as they only score two vic- tory points. An additional tile scores three and is also not particularly attractive. But with tile number six the score jumps to five points. And the best ratio with 1:1 follows after another jump, from eight tiles onwards, although this requires some patience. As there are only 24 tiles with the pri- mary colors yellow, red and green, and only 16 or 12 with
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one major project at a time, or else the development potential in other colors will be far too limited. To prevent the tiles
from joining up too
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ing to their size and height.
The so-called Dragon Castle, which
also serves as a quarry, comes with three preprinted maps and additional sugges- tions in the rulebook for various player counts. In places, this castle can get up to three levels high, and access to the tiles of the first and second level depends on the
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that then generate victory points accord-
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soon, smaller groups have to be
kept separately, while on the other hand you need to keep your options open to unite them with two tiles in one move later on. Here the risk to be foiled later in the game is also significantly higher with more players.
Not only the covered area, but also the height of a castle is relevant for scoring. If a tile finishes a building area and is placed on top of another
tile in the bottom
level, this only
gains you one vic-
tory point. On level
p
p
t
t
he special colors blue, black and h
urple, sourcing material naturally u
g
gets more difficult with each addi-
tional player.
On top of that, your own
player board only has 24 spaces, which is why it makes no sense to pursue more than