Castle Keep by Gamewright Games

I got a copy of Castle Keep for Father’s Day this year.  It was an immediate hit.  My kids wanted to play this game every night for about two weeks.  Its rules are simple and easy to grasp.  It plays in a maximum of 20 minutes and is easy to reset for another game.  The game involves building a castle with a keep in the middle.  That’s it.  Well, almost.

The object of the game is to build your castle out of nine tiles – one keep and eight wall tiles.  Consisting of three different shapes and three different colors, the wall are joined at the corners by towers.  Wall and towers are matched either according to color or shape or both.  The keep must match the color of one of the walls.

At the start of the game the tiles are shuffled, face down.  Players are dealt 4 tiles each.  The rest of the tiles are placed in the middle in two stacks.  These are the draw stacks.  On a turn a players draws two tiles from the draw stack.  The player can then either build onto his castle, attack an opponent’s castle or keep, or pass.  At the end of the turn the player discards down to four tiles.

Castles are built by placing them next to each other based on color and/or shape.  Red goes with red, yellow with yellow, blue with blue.  Round towers match to curvy walls, square towers with straight walls, and diamond towers with jagged walls.  Players may attack an opponent’s castle by playing a wall tile that is an exact match for that opponent’s wall tile directly on top of that tile.  The attacking tiel and attacked tile are discarded.  And any same colored tiles are also removed!  This can be devastating.  In one game I had my whole castle destroyed this way.  To attack a keep players play two matching keeps on top of the attacked keep.  Play continues until someone completes his castle.

The tiles are heavy thick cardboard and are easy to handle.  The rules sheet is clear and concise.  The artwork is good and it is easy to distinguish between each type of tile.  This is a small game and travels easily.

As I said, my kids like this one a lot.  And there is enough there to satisfy gamers as a quick filler too.

Check it out.

Go Forth and Game,

tomg