Game Overview: The Castles of Tuscany, or Hexed in Italy

With the online conventions behind us, I'm catching up on many things, such as my inbox and (more importantly for this space) video overviews of new game releases.

In the past few weeks, I've finally started gaming again, with us playing outdoors on a screened-in porch while wearing masks. Obviously not seeing anyone at all would be the safest route to go these days, but I've been feeling isolated and desperate to interact with humans outside of my immediate family, so this seemed the second-best option. Playing games in person is a balm for the troubled spirit (as long as you don't play with jerks or weirdos), and ideally all of us can do so again on a regular basis before too much more time passes. We'll see...

In any case, Stefan Feld's The Castles of Tuscany from alea was one of the first titles to hit the table, and I've now played it twice each with two, three, and four players on a review copy from parent company Ravensburger. I won't repeat everything that I've said in the video below, but here's a short take on the game:

Winning board on the lower right, with several large areas

On a turn in The Castles of Tuscany, you draw region cards, draft a region tile, or spend cards to place a region tile on your personal region board, gaining an immediate bonus based on that tile's color and scoring points if you finished filling an area of that color. Cards and tiles both come in eight colors, and to place a tile, you must spend two cards of the same color, with two cards of any matching color serving as a joker. Thus, to place a blue tile, you must spend two blue cards, a blue card and a matching pair of cards, or any two matching pairs.

The eight region tiles available are chosen at random, and they're replaced at random from a player's personal supply of tiles. Maybe you'll flip over a color that an opponent needs, or maybe you won't! When someone has placed one-third of their tiles, players score, banking all of their current "green" points onto a secondary "red" scoring track. This happens again after someone has placed two-thirds of their tiles, then you score once more after someone has placed all of their tiles. This means that points you score in the first third of the game are added to your total three times, so don't dawdle on getting things done.

You start the game with one of five bonus actions, and you draft another bonus action each time you place a red city tile on your region board. These tiles let you draw more cards, have more room for tiles in reserve, or modify certain color bonuses. These tiles give you a way to customize your building efforts, and while two of them seem clearly better than the others, I'm not sure that's true after seeing someone put together an impressive "worker" engine and after using a "yield card" engine of my own.

Your initial region board set-up affects what's possible later in terms of growth and bonuses, although you're also at the mercy of random card draws and tile flips, not to mention the non-random actions of opponents. You can't coast through the game with a single plan because the tiles might not appear or someone else might take them from you, forcing you to build in some other way.

Players also compete for color bonuses, being rewarded if they're the first or second person to cover all areas of a color on their region board, but not enough tiles are available for everyone to complete each color, so you need to keep watch over who's taking what. Your region board set-up affects this competition as well, and if possible, you want to complete a color or two before the second scoring so that those points are also doubled.

In five of our games, the player ahead after the first third of the game stayed ahead to win, but that didn't happen in the sixth game, and I think we've finally gotten better at both building our personal game engines and staying more cognizant of who wants what when so that we can keep someone from scoring and compounding those early points. More on this and other topics in this video overview: