Teach the Game

Build a castle over three years, hire craftsmen and balance exterior prestige against interior prestige.

How you win

Complete castle buildings and decorations to earn exterior and interior Prestige. At the end of year three, your score is the lower of those two totals, plus bonus-condition and leftover-gold points. Plan both sides of your castle together: a striking façade cannot make up for an empty interior.

The boards

The main board holds six instructor actions, the Raw Materials Factory, Market, shared building spaces, lands, bonus conditions, Events, season track and Prestige track. Each player has a Castle board for their estate and a Craftsman board for available specialists and Master Builder experience. The numbered board picture below follows the publisher’s English rules.

1. Instructor action bar · 2. Raw Materials Factory · 3. Resource income · 4. Market · 5. Inn · 6. Lands · 7. Bonus conditions · 8. Event cards · 9. Prestige track · 10. Season marker · 11. Player order.

A season

A year has Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. Each season, players place their five instructors on action spaces, then resolve the season’s actions. Instructors choose when you act in the six areas; the number on the space sets your position in that area’s queue. Workers and resources pay for taking materials, expanding your estate and completing building orders.

Building orders finish at the end of the season. Resolve the Raw Materials Factory instructors first, then building orders in order. Remaining instructors determine the next season’s player order. Reset Market prices, collect income and retrieve at most one worker from the Inn for 1 gold.

How the game ends

The game ends after the Winter season of year three. At the end of each year, pay the wood levy for your exterior buildings or lose Prestige. In the final Winter, resolve building orders and the levy, then score; do not collect the ordinary end-of-season income.

Ways to score

Basic Buildings, floors, towers, wall facings, statues and decorations award exterior or interior Prestige. Bonus conditions award tiles or points during play. At final scoring, subtract the smaller Prestige track from the larger and halve the difference, rounding down. Then add the lower track, bonus points and points from leftover gold.

What each resource is for

Gold pays for land, Market purchases, craftsmen and workers. Wood, limestone, marble and glass are construction materials. Workers are assigned to resource actions and building orders; some are exhausted and go to the Inn until retrieved. Your resource-income markers show how many units you can take at the factory.

Teaching tips

Teach the building-order sequence before the detailed tile effects. Players should watch both Prestige tracks, keep enough wood for each winter levy and leave workers available for the contracts they intend to finish. The guide’s Gameplay, Building and Scoring pages walk through those systems.