Designer Diary: Retrofitting Mad King Ludwig's Castle with Towers, Decrees, and a Fifth Player

Board Game: Castles of Mad King Ludwig: Collector's Edition

I've been noodling around on various Castles of Mad King Ludwig expansions since the original game was sent off to the printer in the middle of 2014. Some of those — moats, swans, and secret passages — came together in the Secrets package, but the others never materialized, and other games slowly drew my attention away from them.

When we started planning for the Castles of Mad King Ludwig: Collector's Edition, I pulled out my notes and designs from those expansions in the hope I could find something that would be worthy for the new release. Some of the concepts had been borrowed and modified for The Palace of Mad King Ludwig spinoff, and others just...didn't seem appealing. I had to start from scratch, which unbeknownst to me was (spoiler alert!) going to work out really well.

Castles Have Upstairs, Too

The one concept that I had really wanted for a Castles expansion was a second story. Castles had basement rooms, and they provided an interesting twist and limitation; basement rooms are pretty desirable, but they require stairs and they also can't be connected to any other castle rooms. My initial focus was on how to make a second story interesting and totally different than the basement rooms.

One of the ideas for a second floor was some sort of platform, either cardboard or plastic, where you'd put rooms you purchased (after purchasing the platform or a spiral staircase), and those rooms would give you double points/rewards — but the physical logistics of that were daunting. It would be difficult to place and view rooms under the platform, the rooms could get knocked off the top, and the plastic or cardboard used to create it would have to be large, taking up a ton of box space.

Still, I was determined to figure it out. Eventually I started toying around with making towers; they wouldn't be empty below, but you would be able to place one or more rooms on top. Put a few towers together for more space for upstairs rooms. I started sketching out what the towers would look like, then created a super simple tower for my 3D printer, which unfortunately resembled a cheap outdoor side table you might find in a dollar store. The legs on it were corner-shaped, which made the room under it a unique shape — and that shape was the beginning of what would become the tower room tiles.

Rooms up top were precarious and made it difficult to see the tower room under the plastic tower, so instead of focusing on placing more rooms up there, I decided instead to focus on the tower room itself. I wanted to provide a new kind of completion reward for it, but because tower rooms were probably going to be the same color as existing room types, that would be confusing to players. Instead, I added a completion type for tower rooms; now when you complete a tower room, you get the reward of that room color/type, and you also get a brand new tower completion reward. This made the towers even more desirable, because after all, who doesn't want a tower in their castle?

That tower reward was simple: Take three unused favors and secretly choose one to keep, placing it face down on the tower and scoring it at the end of the game only for yourself relative to the other players. On a roll now, I decided to make eight tower rooms and plastic towers, one for each type of room. I proceeded to name the towers after castles that Ludwig lived in or built.

After some self-testing, I liked how it was working out, and I convinced the staff to playtest a few times...success! This was definitely the right direction. Here's an image of a plastic "table" tower above a food room. To its right is the early version of a downstairs tower room.

The values for the towers were tweaked quite a bit throughout the playtesting process, and the tower room shape evolved to have bigger, more rounded corners. As production continued, the towers themselves also slowly changed into eight unique towers, each of which represents the architecture of the castle they represent.

By the time the photo below was taken, we were using 3D-printed minis based on the designs from Hakan Diniz, our very talented 3D artist. The minis cover the favor, keeping it protected from prying eyes until the end of the game and adding a kind of trophy to your castle to show that you've completed one of the tower rooms.

I Decree You Will Get a Decree

While the towers expansion was getting polished, I wasn't satisfied with that being the lone expansion in the Collector's Edition. While it checked a lot of boxes, it was relatively small in scope. I then set to work on what I was calling the "house rules" expansion.

You know how when you're playing a game and you don't like something in the rules, the group decides they're going to play the game a little differently? That's what house rules are. The original concept was that every time someone built a tower, a new "house rule" would go into effect, such as "Rooms cost $2 less" or "Choose from 3 Bonus cards instead of 2 when you complete an Orange/Utility room"; those changes would stack up throughout the game.

Yeah, that was a terrible idea, but then I thought: What if those things just impacted the player who built that tower? Well, that would make those towers way too valuable. (They were already priced at the 10,000 and 15,000 spots by most Master Builders.) However, I had already come up with a list of about twenty of these house rules, and I liked the variety they might introduce to the game. Having them as unique starting abilities was the next idea, and it stuck!

Here's an image of an early four-player playtest; you can see some house rules printed on white paper with black text. Also below, you can see a very early version of what is now the winter lake scoreboard.

Players would draft an ability at the start of the game and have it throughout. The overall concept was fine, and the abilities (for the most part) weren't too overpowering — but they weren't balanced, and that proved to be one of the most challenging aspects of what became royal decrees: how to balance them. I eventually settled on two rules for the abilities that provided additional money or VPs: A player who focuses on their decree should gain between 10-20 VPs or $10-20K extra spending money as a result of having that decree. That proved to be a great way to balance most of them, though they are of course subjective in terms of how players value them.

My personal favorite decree is the "Hide all coins under this card" decree that allows you to keep your money hidden throughout the game, flummoxing attempts of Master Builders to either prevent you from getting that room you want or take every last coin from you during the process. It isn't anyone else's favorite decree and the value of it is probably at the low end of the $10-20 range, but it makes me happy to watch the Master Builder look around to see how much money players have and groan when they get to me...

Swan Expansion, Take Two

In addition to the two new expansions, I also wanted to fix the swan expansion from Secrets. The expansion itself was fine, but it introduced a giant hassle during set-up, requiring players to count out rooms from the base game and Secrets, then shuffle them for each of the ten room sizes.

Since that the rooms and artwork were being completely redone for the Collector's Edition, I used the opportunity to change how swans are distributed. Instead of a specific number of rooms in every stack having swans, I changed it so that four of the (now) eleven room sizes had swans on them. Because there are more of the small rooms in a stack, I made the two largest small stacks (250 and 300) and the two smallest large stacks (350 and 400) all have swan icons. As a reminder for players, I put a swan icon on the backs of those rooms, too.

Now the only additional thing you need to do if you want to play with swans is to put the forty swan tokens out face down; when a 250/300/350/400 room comes up, a random face-up swan is placed on it, and the player who buys that room gets that swan. If you don't want to play with swans, don't put out the swan tokens! No additional nasty set-up required.

That Fifth Player Problem Was Solved Because It Was Easy

When Castles was originally being playtested, we tried the game with five players and there were all sorts of problems. At the time, I was mostly focused on making sure everything was balanced for two, three, and four players, and because five-player tests were so problematic, I didn't spend a significant amount of time on it. I didn't even consider doing a five-player expansion as part of the Secrets expansion.

The idea of how to make five players work must have been slowly gestating in the back of my mind for the last seven years because one day I just had it...though it turns out you do need more components than the base game contained. Most of the five-player changes were linear:

Room cards: For two players you use 22 room cards, for three players 33, and for four players 44, so for five players, you need 55. Unfortunately the original game came with only fifty cards, but thanks to the towers expansion, there were exactly five more room cards in the deck. You are now using all of the cards instead of a random subset of them, but the randomness of adding that extra player offsets the predictability of knowing how many cards there are in the deck for each of the room sizes. That in itself makes the five-player game have a slightly different feel than other player counts.

Rooms: For two players there are 5 small and 4 large rooms, for three players 7 small and 5 large rooms, and for four players 9 small and 6 large rooms, so for five players there are 11 small and 7 large rooms. Since the Secrets rooms aren't dependent on swan icons anymore, there were plenty of rooms to make that happen.

Favors: There are the same number of favors as there are players, so for five players you should have five favors. And the scoring hasn't changed, meaning that the player who comes in fifth for a favor scores 0.

Master Builder spaces: For two players, you use five of the seven spaces, for three players, you use six spaces, and for four players, you use all seven spaces, so for five players...well, this presented a bit of a problem. I didn't want to add another space at the low end. That would mean one room was free, dramatically changing the flow of the game and wrecking a bunch of pricing strategy. Pricing a room higher than the 15,000 space meant that it was entirely out of reach for players until after they've become Master Builder or take $5 on a turn. The compromise was to place two room tiles on the 15,000 space, each of them costing 15,000. That also served to give the Master Builder some extra money because now they had to go four turns without collecting any income.

Other things needed to be done as well, such as adding two hallways, one stairs, and another player marker, but overall it worked well and fit nicely into the overall mechanical structure of the game.

In addition, the extra time for the fifth player is certainly there, but because turns are pretty short — the biggest downtime in Castles tends to be waiting for the Master Builder to price rooms — it isn't that noticeable, and now Castles is a solid five-player game. Even with me being very happy with how well five players works, I've added a warning in the rules not to play with five players on your first game of Castles if everyone playing is new. This will hopefully prevent the dreaded first-game-is-way-longer-than-the-published-time problem.

Designing Is Only the Beginning

As a designer/publisher, I'm often doing both jobs simultaneously and with the Collector's Edition, the designing, playtesting, and revising part was by far the most fun I had as this new iteration of Castles came to life.

However, there was a ton of work to be done to make the Collector's Edition as amazing as possible at a reasonable price, and even when all the expansions and changes were playtested and finalized, the production work was just beginning. This whole project has come together really well in the end, and I'm thrilled to finally be able to show it off to fans of the game, and hopefully new players as well!

Ted Alspach