GaGa Games publishing house announced that the board game "The White Castle: Duel" has been released in Russia, receiving a rating of 7.9 out of 10 on the BoardGameGeek portal. It can now be purchased for 2490 rubles.
In this project, two clans compete for influence at court. Since the original "The White Castle" can also be played by two people, the authors of "Duel" did not just reduce the number of players. They created a completely different game, retaining only the general idea and visual implementation of the original.
Here, gamers will not have dice, bridges, or clan members to place on the field, but they will retain variability and depth of strategies, crisis resource management, and multi-level combos. The game is divided into two rounds, each with six moves. In the first round, players must place lantern tokens on the field, and in the second, they must take them to their personal tablet.
By placing a lantern token in a location or taking it, the player performs two adjacent actions. This can be buying a new influence card for a personal engine, activating resource cards, moving a courtier through the castle, sending clan representatives to gardens or training grounds, or foreign trade.
Representatives in the gardens bring resources and symbols necessary for the final score calculation: flags, katanas, kabuto, and origami. Soldiers on the training grounds provide additional actions and multipliers for calculating katana and kabuto symbols. Courtiers bring one-time bonuses and multipliers for flags. And trade with the Portuguese allows buying new influence cards and goods with different symbols.
Game trailer from the Devir publishing house's YouTube channel
At the end of the game, players sum up points for earned symbols, taking into account received multipliers, as well as for remaining resources. The one who scores the most points becomes the most influential clan leader.