The Castles of Burgundy: Special Edition

I already had the original Castles of Burgundy on my shelf and had no real business backing this, and I knew it going in, but the acrylic hex tiles won me over completely in the preview images. Having played it now, I don’t regret it, though I understand why some reviews call it needless deluxification.

The core game hasn’t changed, dice drafting into tile placement onto your personal hexmap, and it’s still one of the tightest, most replayable euros I own, every game generates a different available-tiles pool so the puzzle never quite solves the same way twice. What the special edition actually improves is legibility, oddly, since I’d have guessed a fancier edition would make things harder to read at a glance, and instead the updated art and layout made building tiles and animal tiles easier to tell apart at speed, which matters more than I expected in a game where you’re constantly scanning your board.

The acrylic tiles themselves are the real selling point, chunky, satisfying to place, and they solve a problem the cardboard originals had where similar-colored buildings blurred together on a crowded board. I don’t have the 3D sundrop castle pieces, decided that upgrade was a bridge too far even for me, but the tiles alone justified the cost difference for my table.

It’s still, structurally, a multiplayer-solitaire game, you’re mostly building your own hexmap independent of what anyone else does, and if that bothers you at the base game it’ll bother you here too, no amount of acrylic changes that. My group doesn’t mind it, we treat it as a shared puzzle-solving session with light competitive stakes, and it plays fine at that register.

Four stars, would’ve been fine sticking with my original copy honestly, but I’m glad I didn’t.