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There ain't no party like a Castle Party! Come on! It’s time to boogie on down at the Pumpkin King’s palatial pad!
If you haven’t been invited to the celebrations yet, Castle Party is a flip and write bingo style game where everybody draws the same symbols each turn. But, unlike many in the pen and paper genre, you have direct impact on your opponents’ boards!
Move, Monster
Designed by Josep Allué and Eugeni Castaño and published by DEVIR, this game was a spooky surprise from the get-go. If you’re first player, you get to flip a shape card which will set the polyomino you’re recreating underneath it for the turn. You can choose which way up or round the shape is going to be drawn, and you get to choose which monster card you want to use from your hand to start completing the shape. But it must be placed where the red X is shown on the card.
Once all the players have laid a monster card, you then transpose the relevant monster symbols onto your Castle board in the shape you have just built together. They can go anywhere and don’t need to be butted up against other shapes (although you’ll want to do this for points!)
Perfect Perspective
Cleverly, because you are sitting in different places around the table, your perspective of that shape is going to be unique. So your “L” shape combination of symbols is always going to look different to someone else’s!
Party People
Throughout the game you can see what other players’ parties look like. And because there are 3 scoring phases during the game (i.e. whenever a clock card is revealed in the shape deck) as well as end-game points, you can start to meddle! And as you can probably guess, having one eye on what others are drawing lets you see how well they are working towards each goal (as well as your own efforts!). There are also three one time powers to use to your advantage – 2 of which will change things up for everyone around the table!
Party Powers
Not only that, however, but you also have 3 special one-time bonus powers during the game. Plus, if you choose to use Lights Out (where you can switch monster positions to better suit your own goal progress) or Change (where you can reorient the shape), that is going to affect everybody! Masked Ball is the third power (where you turn one monster from the shape into a wild), but that won’t cause any changes to anybody else’s plans. Having said that, somebody could use one of their own bonus power on the same turn to flip-reverse your fiddling efforts!
Final Thoughts
We have a lot of flip and write games and we flipping love the genre! Cartographers aside, however, I think this is one of the few we have where we are actively meddling with each other. We have plenty of games where flips or rolls impact everybody, but that’s often down to luck rather than judgment. In Castle Party, you have some higher level of control on your turn. Okay so it can be flip reversed by another player using their special powers. But abilities to reverse your efforts come at a cost to those wanting to pay it.
I also love games that bring in a perspective element (like Akrotiri). They fire up my woefully spatially challenged mind in the best possible way. As such, Castle Party has turned out to be a great choice for us. Not only that but it fits nicely within our daily golden gaming hour (with time to spare for another!).
Granted the pens could be a little better but that is a very minor niggle. Plus you are always going to be scoring for the same 3 objectives each time you play. Luck in terms of what monsters you draft each turn might also be on your side or it might not.
But strategy does come to this party. As well as points during the game, there are symbol majority bonuses (boosted with Kings) and incrementally scoring unicorns to collect. Deciding whether to draw outside the lines is also another consideration.
Less restrictive than many grid based games, you can draw shapes in the moat or on the drawbridge. After all, losing a symbol into the moat might help you orient the remainder of a shape better for a scoring objective. But knowing you’ll get negative points at end game as well as the fact they are discounted in any majority group, definitely gives pause for thought. Likewise, knowing scoring will happen 3 times during the game force some pre-planning. And if that’s not enough for you there’s a more advanced “rave” mode on the flipside of the board with extra points up for grabs if you can throw your shapes on the dancefloor just right!
There’s a fun thinkiness to Castle Party and the perspective and interactive quirks are as refreshing to us as pumpkin party punch!
