Designer Diary: Castle Dash – Light Games Move Faster // Game Preview

Castle Dash is a testament to simplicity over complexity. I'm a bit ahead of myself, though. First, a bit of background on the game.

Castle Dash is a quick-playing worker placement battle game that has players working to steal treasure and rescue captives from each other. The first player to steal three treasures from her opponents is the winner.

The game started as Castle Capers, a print-on-demand title about rescuing your king from your opponents. In designer Trevor Clifford's own words:

Quote:

I was originally inspired to make Castle Capers after reading about Stronghold for the first time. Stronghold looked great but seemed way too heavy for the people I play games with. I tried to come up with something much lighter that supported more players, while also limiting myself to the components available on The Game Crafter's website.

Castle Capers' original game board

That core vision still remains. The game Castle Dash from 5th Street Games is a clean descendant of Castle Capers as it has only two key rules changes, has new bonus cards to be claimed, and is now scalable to six players.

It took a few iterations to get there, though. Originally, Castle Capers had walls that could be built to protect your castle by blocking one soldier per brick in the wall. These were removed to speed up play, but made stealing too easy. What to do? Add more things to steal with variable weight, of course!

Progress?

The idea was this: After battle, any soldiers left over could steal items only of weight equal to or less than the number of soldiers raiding the castle. That wasn't enough, though; the treasure also had to be carried back to your castle over several turns by your soldiers. However, if you stole something that weighed less than what your soldiers could carry, you would get a movement bonus. Players would now make choices of what to steal, right?

Wrong. Playtests quickly revealed the optimal play was to steal stuff you could get back to your castle in a single turn, freeing up the soldiers to be used immediately. Paradoxically, players liked the concept of the soldiers carrying back the treasure and being unusable as they did so. o_O

With the game becoming more and more complex in an attempt to fix the movement system, it was hit upon that the loss of the soldiers as assets was what people liked. Progress is made toward victory at the cost of fewer options. Why not just remove movement and have the soldiers attack the castle walls? Say in those little slot things from the original version?

This change worked like a charm and even led to the creation of new Armory cards that fit this form of play. It also kept closer to Castle Capers' original concept, which I liked. Bonus. After minor tweaking for three- and five-player play, Castle Dash was done. It just took a few extra turns to be carried there.

Phil Kilcrease

Sample Armory cards

•••

Game Preview, by W. Eric Martin

As a short description, Stronghold boiled down to its simplest elements does seem an apt description.

Each player starts with 8 or 9 soldiers with two or three opponents holding hostage one other soldier of theirs. Each round, after revealing twice as many special-powered Armory cards as there are players, each player takes turns either placing one soldier on an Armory card to claim it or 1-6 soldiers in battle against the opponent to the left or right (or straight across in the four- and six-player game). Once soldiers have been placed in a battle, the player cannot add forces later that same turn.

Once all the soldiers have been placed, players claim Armory cards, using any that immediate effects. Then the battles are carried out between the various players, with each player rolling a d4 and adding that number to the number of soldiers in battle. (Players can also use Armory cards and their cannonballs to affect battle.) Whichever player has a higher sum places soldiers equal to the difference of the two values on the wall of that opponent's castle. If that player has three or more soldiers on the wall, that player reclaims his soldiers, then either rescues his soldier held hostage or takes a coin from that opponent; if that player has only one or two soldiers on the wall, those soldiers sit on the wall for next round, threatening future theft but useless in the next battles.

Be the first to steal three or more coins and you win the game.