The king is at it again!

More crazy castles to build with your neighbors and options to go it alone!

Last year we reviewed a fun game from Stonemaier Games called Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig. It was a mash up of two games we really enjoy — Between Two Cities and Castles of Mad King Ludwig. And they did a fantastic job bringing those two games together in yet another enjoyable game.

So of course we were excited to get a chance to review this new expansion, Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig: Secrets & Soirees.

And it’s time to share our thoughts about the expansion game!

 

How to play Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig: Secrets & Soirees

Since this is a review of a game expansion, if you’re not yet familiar with Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig, I’d suggest you first jump over to our review of the base game. Then hop back over here to see what’s new to this tile-laying, castle-building, neighbor-negotiating game.

The Secrets and Soirees expansion adds 3 new types of rooms (Activity, Ballroom, & Secret), a slight rule change to Sleeping Rooms, new Bonus cards, 2 solitaire modes, a 2-player variant, and room for up to 8 players!

 

The New Rooms

As with the original game, the crux of the game (and scoring) is in the rooms. After all, that’s what makes up a fabulous castle — lots of rooms!

Activity Rooms have one room type that they don’t like being next too. If they’re adjacent to such a room, that activity room only scores 1 point. However, if it’s not next to such a room, then it scores 1 point per each orthogonally adjacent tile.

When a 3rd Activity Room is placed, they draw 3 Ballrooms and choose 1 of those to keep and place in their castle. Each Ballroom has a particular type of room that it wants in the adjacent castles. It scores 1 point for every room of that type in the adjacent castles.

Secret Rooms can be placed anywhere in the castle and they duplicate the regular room type that their arrow is pointing at. It duplicates the room type, wall hangin, and scoring rule of that tile. Once placed, the player places a token of the room type on it so it’s easy to quickly see what room type it is. And it also counts towards the number of rooms of that type placed for rewarding specialty tiles. (The expansion comes with token that represent the different types of rooms.)

Since there are now more room types in the game, the Sleeping Rooms score 4 points if the castle has any 6 other regular room types.

Plus, the game includes 24 new regular room tiles — including a basement hideout, tent room, ball storage, dice tower room, horseshoe pit, jammery, and a crystal cave!

 

The New Bonus Cards

There’s not much to say about the new bonus cards other than to say that they account for having the new room types in the game as well as some additional scoring opportunities not covered in the original game — such as for the different wall hangings or speciality rooms in adjacent castles.

 

Variants

The game rules include an option where players just build 1 castle for themselves (rather than jointly building a castle with each of their neighbors).

In this variant, players still choose 2 tiles each turn. However, they choose one for their own castle and place one face down for their castle to their left (to the right in round 2). The difference being that their neighbor doesn’t have a say in what tile they’re given. When everyone has chosen, players flip over the one they were given from their neighbor and must place both tiles in their castle.

The new 2-player variant in Secrets and Soirees also follows this pattern.

 

Solitaire Modes

The Secrets and Soirees expansion includes 2 different solitaire modes where a person plays against artificial opponents. These are the “Automa” system and “Introvert Variant” modes of play.

Since the rulebook for these solitaire mode is longer than the main rulebook, I won’t go into details on each mode — but will give a high-level view of each.

Automa

In this version, the player plays against 2 artificial players (named Roberta von Links and Roberta von Rechts) and shares a castle with each (Linkenstein and Rechtsburg). The two Automa players share a castle called Roburg.

There is a shared hand of 9 tiles that the player and Automa take turns drawing and placing 2 tiles from. And there are also turn order cards and Automa cards that programmatically show steps for the Automa turn. These essentially indicate which type of tiles Automa will take and place in the specific castle areas.

Scoring is normal for the 2 castles the player is working on but differs for Roburg. Roburg is essentially scored based on number of tiles in columns and the difficulty level.

Introvert Variant

Similar to the main game variant, in this solitaire mode, the player competes against just 1 artificial opponent and each builds their own castle. The Automa cards are also used in this mode and there is again a face up set of tiles in a round that are shared.

The Automa player places tiles in the Roburg castle in columns based on the room type and gets points at the end of the game based on how many tiles are in the columns. Whereas, the human player builds their castle as normal and scores points as normal as well. The difficulty level chosen at the start of the game determines the base set of point granted the Automa player.

 

Our Thoughts on the Expansion

We’ve already shared how much we enjoy playing Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig. And adding more goodies to the game without a lot of overhead gets a thumbs up from us.

At least, that’s the case with the new Activity and Secret rooms. We like those additions and they fit in perfectly with the style of the game and the crazy castle theme. The scoring rules for each of those are fun to have in the mix. And the name and art style on the new tiles is awesome. For example, some of the secret rooms include Through The Wardrobe, Push the Third Stone, Behind the Bookcase, and Beyond the Pail.

We also like the scoring for the Ballrooms that grant points based on neighboring castles because it keeps you watching what’s going on in neighboring castles.

Of course, adding more types of tiles does still mean a bit more thinking is needed during game play. There are more factors to consider when building castles with your neighbors and the game length is a little bit more than in just the base game.

So if we want to shorten the game a bit, we like to roll over to the personal castle variant where we each build our own castle. Nice and simple since you don’t have to talk things out each turn with your neighbors.

Yet you still have to factor in the tile they pass to you!

Which means there are ways you can mess a bit with your neighbors castle — by forcing them to add a tile that you pass them. And honestly, that’s a lot of fun too!

The part of the expansion we don’t care for are the Solitaire Modes.

We know there are many people asking for solo game modes in popular games. However, we’re not in that camp. We love board games because of the social nature. Sure, COVID has curtailed some of that, but that still doesn’t mean we want to play board games solo.

When I’m on my own and want to play a game, I’m going to choose playing a video game. I’d rather dive back into Breath of the Wild than shuffle tiles around on a table by myself.

That being said, I don’t have a problem with the solo modes being in the expansion at all. Those that enjoy solo games can have at it. Whereas, those Automa cards will stay fresh in their bags in our copy.

Speaking of components, we love how everything fits so nicely in the original game box!

Stonemaier did a fantastic job at providing an expansion insert that fits perfectly with the original game inserts so everything can be stored nicely in one box. We love that!

In the end, if you love playing Between Two Castles, we’d recommend adding the Secrets and Soirees expansion to your game. It adds more goodies to the mix that keep the castles just like Mad King Ludwig would want.

(Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig: Secrets and Soirees will begin shipping in June.)

We’d like to thank Stonemaier Games for a review copy of Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig: Secrets and Soirees.