Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I heard a lot of hype about this game when it first came out, especially on QT3. As Hiew mentioned, it’s notable for supporting seven players and yet still remaining a short game. Some personal notes:

• It manages to achieve this design goal mainly by being a multiplayer solitaire game in which each player most focuses on building up his own stuff while occasionally borrowing resources from his neighbors or causing them harm through military might.
• The basic gameplay is deceptively simple, which also explains why it plays so quickly. It’s just choosing one card to keep each turn, most likely based on your ability to pay for it, and passing the rest to the next player.
• There are many different ways to score. You can collect sets of particular cards, certain cards are worth a specific number of points, some cards acts like the 6-point Developments in Race for the Galaxy, giving you points for cards you have or even cards that the two players next to you have, plus you can gain point tokens for having more military power than your neighbors at the end of each of the three ages.
• Despite the centrality of the wonders to the theme and the name, building your own wonder is strictly optional. Basically it’s there to give you something to throw cards at, and perhaps a goal to reach for, in case you have no better combination of cards to work towards.
• Overall, the rules are very simple, but it’s hard to build your own stuff while also keeping a watch on what other players are doing. At least paying attention to your immediate neighbors is absolutely necessary since you can use their resources and their military directly threaten you.

I did pretty badly in this game, because I was flummoxed by the icons (no text on the cards at all except for names) and the tech tree which allows you to build some cards for free if you already have prerequisites. Familiarity with this will no doubt come from experience. But I can see how it can be addictive to play and try to get better scores. A very impressive package for such a simple set of rules and such a short playing time.