Castles of Mad King Ludwig & Castles of Mad King Ludwig Secrets

My husband and I love to play games. We were Introduced to this game when visiting friends and fell in love. Challenging and fun. Highly recommend!

Yes, the game is a little tricky to learn, but it is so worth it! The re-playability of this game is amazing. We play often and it's always a little different from the last time. I highly recommend this game.

The economy is interesting. The castles can be funny. It can be fiddly to score.

Great game with excellent replayability.

One of my favorite board games we have in our collection so far!! My husband and I are a young couple in our late 20's, and we love to play games with just the two of us and with friends. A great bonus is always a game that we can play 2-player and still works nicely; this one has that ability and we love it.The game is really easy, but there are a TON of pieces.. the setup is a little annoying. BUT the gameplay is usually over an hour, sometimes close to 2 hours if you have someone playing that takes forever to decide on their move.. therefore, the setup is pretty quick compared to the amount of play you get out of it.Essentially, each player gets the chance to be the "master builder," and this rotates throughout the game. When you're the master builder, you draw cards which determine what size rooms will be in play for the next round. Then, each player can purchase any of these rooms, but must pay the master builder. Finally, the master builder goes last and pays the bank. You attach your cute, quirky little room to your castle layout, check the center icons to see if you can add points (based on what the room is adjacent to) or lose points. There are also bonuses that you keep in mind throughout gameplay such as bonus cards you draw and keep an eye on secretly, and bonuses that everyone can see (person with the most square rooms at the end, person with the most outdoor rooms, etc). Once you've gone through all of the cards, you add up all of your bonus points, and check out your fun little castles.My favorite part about this game is the creative and interesting castle layouts you end up with! It's different every single game. The key is to keep an eye on those bonuses, and try to buy rooms that meet the requirements ;) I almost always win using this strategy, hehe.We just played this game with another couple that don't really play a ton of board games and they wanted to buy it after we finished. It took a couple rounds to figure out how to play, but once you get it, it's very repetitive (in a good way). I LOVE this game, like I said, it's one of my absolute favorite games!I would recommend this for couples and families. I think a kid over 8 could probably figure it out, it's just a little overwhelming with all of the adding and subtracting points every time you add a new room, but kids are great at stuff like that usually :). Buy this game, worth every penny!

I bought this game despite having promised myself that I wouldn't buy any new games for a while - but my wife had seen it online and expressed an interest in it. We love playing Carcassonne, and the idea of playing a tile-based building game which also involved building a castle was too much for her to resist! So I bought it. As with most games, it took a little time to understand the rules, but once we got the hang of it, which was really pretty quick, we found this to be very enjoyable. Others have described the gameplay so I won't go into that here. I'll just add a few thoughts of my own.1. Whoever said they think it'll be a Spiel des Jahres contender is spot on. This fulfills a criterion I have for a great game, which is that it is elegant, by which I mean that the gameplay is self-evident and makes sense within itself. There are no rules which seem out of place, it all fits together logically and simply.2. It has high replay value; we've already played it multiple times and I think it will easily become as popular with us as Carcassonne.3. It works well with kids: our 13 year old daughter and 12 year old son enjoy it, and when my wife and I played by ourselves, the kids wanted to see the pictures of the castles we made so they could enjoy the layout and talk about it.4. It works well for 2, 3 or 4 players. Some games are much better with certain numbers of players, but so far we have found no difference in enjoyability. There are differences in dynamics, but not in the fun. My wife also played by herself, by the way (and my son used all the pieces to make one mega-castle, just for the fun of it!), and had fun with it that way too.5. So far, one change we make to the rules: add in more room cards. For example, with 2 players you're supposed to use 22 cards - we used 34 cards last time and it worked excellently. The game didn't seem overlong at all (I didn't time it, but it seemed to fly by!) and the castles were much more impressive! With 4 players, use all the cards.6. Make up a story about your castles! Last time, mine was the 'party castle' (lots of entertaining rooms, gardens, and a nice pumpkin patch off the royal bedroom!), my wife's was the introvert's castle (all private rooms and dungeons, and oddly enough, a vestibule at the far end of the underground rooms, a sort of doctor's waiting room for the torture chamber perhaps?).7. I can see a lot of potential for expansions for this game. I'll be keeping an eye out...

I am a huge board game geek. I have a lot of games and every Christmas I like to treat myself to a new game. I checked board game geek and found this game which looked very appealing.The aim of the game is to get the most points, and you do this by building a castle with rooms, taking heed of what the King wants (i.e. more slumber rooms, or high square footage of downstairs rooms). Its a game that doesn't have dice, each turn instead consisting of the master builder drawing rooms, setting prices for the rooms (there's a bit of strategy involved here, you want to make the desirable rooms expensive enough to reflect their value but cheap enough that people will buy them and give you money), and then taking it in turns to purchase and lay the room tiles.It was quite a different game from others on the market and if you like games like Powergrid, Castles of Burgundy and Settlers of Catan then I think you will also enjoy the Castles of Mad King Ludwig. The only problem I have with this was the cost which I thought was steep at over fifty pounds.

I really enjoy this game; each playthrough is quite different so it has kept my interest for over 18 months so far. The expansion adds even more variability, too. The one weakness is box organisation; the game has very many parts that need to be organised into about 12 piles before play, and yet there is nothing provided (e.g. bags/trays) to help keep these parts separate. To solve this I very highly recommend the wooden box organisers made by "The Broken Token":  Broken Token Box Organizer for Castles of Mad King LudwigBroken Token Box Organizer for Castles of Mad King Ludwig

You are a castle architect, trying to please a mad king. He might decide he wants a castle with as many round rooms as possible, or as many bedrooms as you can fit in. In addition, each player has been given secret objectives as well as the common objectives. Players take it in turns to be the master builder, setting the prices of all the available rooms for that turn. The rooms are suitably crazy, such as the Mold Room, which might adjoin a Pink Closet. One thing to bear in mind is it requires quite a large table (the room pool and score board alone take up half our table).

I have a 9 year old and an 11 year old and they both enjoy the game, as I do. It was a bit tricky at first working out the scoring, and I had to read the rules a few times to be sure I was playing that and the tile laying elements correctly. The rules are only 5 pages long, which is good, and the other parts of the rules were very clear, but scoring for already placed rooms and downstairs rooms took a few reads. The actual game itself flows well, with enough tactical decision making to keep us all interested, particularly when its your turn to act as Master Builder and set the price for the different rooms available for purchase. Set too high a price for the rooms most likely to be interest to your opponents and you may get no buys and no money, set the price too low and your opponent gains more than you. Similarly if a room is of particular interest to you what price should you set? Too low and an opponent may take it before you get the chance, too high and you put your opponents off but pay a lot for it yourself. The actual laying out of the rooms as you add them to your castle needs care to get the best score possible and try to secure bonuses for completing rooms (connecting all doors to other rooms). The use of special secret bonus score cards gives an air of mystery right to the end as its never quite clear until then who's definitely won. Altogether a great game, with plenty of re-playability. And it's fun at the end looking at the weird castle everyone creates, requiring you to go through a dungeon or a garden to get from your bedroom to the bathroom, or similar oddity!

Looks great and plays well. Tile placing game. Fun telling the story of your castle at the end of the game. Works well for a wide range of ages.