The Castles of Burgundy: Special Edition

I already had the original Castles of Burgundy on my shelf and had no real business backing this, and I knew it going in, but the acrylic hex tiles won me over completely in the preview images. Having played it now, I don’t regret it, though I get why other reviews lump it in with the recent trend of over-produced deluxe editions.

The core game hasn’t changed: simple dice drafting and tile placement, dropped onto your personal hexmap, and it’s still one of the tightest, most replayable euros I own, every game generates a different available-tiles pool so the puzzle never quite solves the same way twice. What the special edition actually improves is legibility, oddly, since I’d have guessed a fancier edition would make things harder to read at a glance, and instead the animal icons came out larger and easier to distinguish from one another, and the building tiles are easier to tell apart at speed too, which matters more than I expected in a game where you’re constantly scanning your board.

The acrylic tiles themselves are the real selling point, nice and chunky, satisfying to place, and they solve a problem the cardboard originals had where the buildings and animal tiles were harder to distinguish from each other on a crowded board. I skipped the 3D sundrop castle pieces, they’re neat, but unnecessary, and the acrylic tiles alone were enough for me and justified the cost difference for my table.

It’s still, structurally, multiplayer solitaire, but it’s the best of its kind, you’re mostly building your own hexmap independent of what anyone else does, and if that bothers you at the base game it’ll bother you here too, no amount of acrylic changes that. My group doesn’t mind it, we treat it as a shared puzzle-solving session with light competitive stakes, and it plays fine at that register.

Four stars, would’ve been fine sticking with my original copy honestly, but I’m glad I didn’t.