This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: Castle Combo
Designer: Grégory Grard & Mathieu Roussel
Year: 2024
Country: France
Publisher: Catch Up Games
Castle Combo consist of players buying cards and filling out a 3 x 3 grid. There are two types of cards, town and castle, and each has their own victory point bonuses. Trying to optimize a good combination of cards to get as many victory points as possible is the key to success. For example, if a card gives victory points for every castle card on your grid, then you’ll want to have a lot of castle cards.
Each turn, you can use a key to move a token between the town and the castle, and you can only buy cards from the category where the token is currently located. You can also use a key to refresh the card selection of either town or castle cards. But using keys is a tradeoff because they’re each worth a victory point.
The game is fast to play and it’s end condition is very clear: Once your grid is complete, you’re done. It becomes interesting through replays, trying different strategies, and the complexity of different combinations of cards and their various victory point conditions. In this sense, Castle Combo has a nice feeling of complexity arising from simplicity.