[Ad- gifted product] Every other Monday, after school has ended, you can find us at our local Geek Retreat playing a board game! This week’s game of choice is Keys to the Castle – a fun, strategy tile-based game where you are looking to get from your side of the castle to the opposite side, without any of the other players messing with you too much. The game itself feels quick to set up and understand, and provides for a great length to keep everyone focused and busy!
First, you need to make the castle from the game. This is done by creating a grid of different closed door tiles. The size of your grid depends on how many players you have playing. The doors are all different colors and with them closed, you cannot see what’s on the other side. They have to be unlocked, using keys of a matching color or skeleton keys, so that you can then go through that tile. There are a few other card types; passageways to allow your character to move diagonally between two doors, padlocks that can be placed on doors, so a player needs to use a skeleton key to open them. Some of the doors have a barred side, which means they cannot be walked through. You will need to use a saw to open them back up. Other doors have bonuses like an extra key or an extra turn, so there is a lot of variety to the map itself.
There are a bunch of different characters that you can choose from in Keys to the Castle, which is a fun little bonus. Before starting the game, each player picks a side of the board for their character to start at, and they will be working their way to the other side. Turns have the player drawing a card to their hand of three cards, playing a card, and then (optionally) moving one tile if they can. It’s a quick turn, but there is a lot of chaos that can be caused through putting down padlocks or using keys to re-lock doors someone else have opened so they can make it through.
Robin and Amelia both enjoyed Keys to the Castle, finding the game simple to pick up but challenging to win. There are some times moments when someone could end up really unlucky, with their draws and the doors in front of them, which cannot be helped. This sort of bad luck happened to Amelia once, so instead she started helping me win the game before Dann did. I can see people who are more competitive having a lot of fun messing up each other. It’s just a fun game! We all did like how random the creation of the castle was and all of the different cards that can really change the game.