Castles II

(drawings not included)

Castles II is a very small card game about two castles trying to destroy each other. My goal was to create a game that could fit in your pocket and could be played anywhere. This lead to a few restrictions:

Tiny Rulebook - Tiny Rules. To fit in your pocket, the rules need to be small.
Not many Cards. For the same reason, I couldn't use loads of pieces and cards, only what could be stored with the tiny rulebook.
No Space Requirement. To be able to play it anywhere, it can't have a particular size you need, anywhere must be good enough.

These together lead me to the core feature about Castles II: it uses real space. Instead of a playmat-esque mechanics where cards fit into zones: they move across the tabletop wherever they fit. This does a few things: it solves the need for space; players can just play on whatever space they have available and use the obstacles provided. It also means that that space can be leveraged as a way to create more depth from a simple set of rules; players already understand basic geometry and that big cards can't fit through small gaps.

The Game

The cards are circular, to help with real-space movement. They each have a few icons on them, which tell you how they behave and what they can do. This is in place of any words, both for readability and space-saving.

Each turn, the players get 3 actions. These are split (unevenly) between the diamonds, triangles & circles. Different cards require different action resources to be spent in order to activate. For example, the dragon uses triangle to move, but diamond to attack. This creates a push & pull between the two players as to who gets which actions and why. You might take the squares to activate your own cards, or you might take the triangles to stop me using mine. This achieves the forced player-interaction that can lead to mindgames and tense strategic moments. This is opposed to some TCGs & strategy games, where each player does their own strategy, basically separate to the other players.

On top of that, the actions are simple: attacking requires the cards to be touching and instantly takes them off the table. No numbers or chance. Moving is in a straight line until you touch something. These simple actions really make the player-interaction from the actions shine through.

Things I don't like

Overall I'm really happy with how this game plays, and how players have responded to it. It does a lot of what I like strategy games to do; it's deep yet approachable, quick yet tense. It does something unique compared to other card games, and does it well. That said, there are definitely some issues with it:

Real Space? Some players (particularly those coming from traditional strategy games, like Chess) struggle to get behind the off-grid movement. Whilst they understand how to use it, and build strategies around it, they find it frustrating not having a certainty of a grid. Was this card nudged? Can it slide past that one without touching? These are awkward moments with how the game works. They're technically already covered, but reality isn't as clear-cut as the hypothetical the rules work off. I'm currently not sure of the best way to fix this, if it even needs fixing.
Predetermined Action Choices. Every other turn, you get to choose which action types you get, which deprives your opponent of those actions. Because of this, it can end up being the best option to always stop your opponent acting. This causes two problems:
- It means that you're not able to move properly either (because of the limited card pool), so there are sometimes dead-end turns where only 1 or 2 impactful moves are made. In the latest version, there was a change made to help reduce this, by ensuring a more even distribution of action types amongst cards. Even with this, it's still theoretically possible to force dead-end turns by carefully choosing which cards you place.
- The other is just that it's no longer an interesting decision. If it's better to stop your opponent this turn, then you do that because the alternate can be damning. This was lessened in the same way as above, since a less effective option makes the others more appealing and thereby more of a real choice. However, the problem is still there.