[Ad- gifted product] The Sandcastles of Burgundy is a cute, fun game all about gathering materials from under sand castles to stock different markets within your town. The game itself is a race, where everyone is trying to finish up their towns as fast as possible, earning new points as they could. We got to play The Sandcastles of Burgundy at our local Geek Retreat, as a part of our bi-weekly board game night, which was a perfect start to the warm, summer season. It’s a simple, more adorable version of The Castles of Burgundy, in case you want to get your children started early.
Setting up this game does take a fair bit of time, as there are a lot of different pieces that need to be set up. The sand castles need little colors taped to the top, tokens need to be hidden underneath them, and different meeples need to be placed inside the castle as well. Each player also gets a town, that has a storage unit hanging off of it and a cart that needs to be moved in-between the town and the storage unit. There are different sides of the board, depending on how intense you want the game to be, and different tokens that you can use to increase the challenge of the game. Within the instructions, it sort of explains the age level and difficulty of these rules, so that you can sort of start off on an easier version and work your way through them, as you get use to the game.
The actual turns of The Sandcastles of Burgundy are pretty simple. At the start of a round, everyone rolls their dice and puts them on their dice storage. Then, starting with the first place, you each take actions. A die can be used to open up a sandcastle of a matching color or to move the cart to the storage unit and take a decoration of the same color and bring it to the town. In the easiest mode, if you open up a sandcastle and nothing is there, you get a token that lets you pick what one of your dice lands on, whenever you want.
Once your turn is up, the next person goes, and it continues until all the dice are used. If you uncover a sandcastle that has a meeple under it, you then need to move that meeple to the next sandcastle along, so they are always rotating! Robin and Amelia both really loved the designs of The Sandcastles of Burgundy! The characters and pieces are really well designed and super adorable. The game lets you flip over the market stands once you have fully decorated them, which looks fantastic, and then it becomes a race to find the meeple that matches the market, so that you can gain more points. As you get points for both the markets and meeples on them, it’s whoever has the most points that wins, which is kept track of by a little token of each character moving around the edge.
We played a few rounds of the simple version of The Sandcastles of Burgundy and had a fantastic time going around the board and filling up their decorations! There is only enough tokens for everyone to fill up the board, so you cannot horde a token that you do not need, so everyone is just racing. The summer-y theme of sandcastles, complete with a little party crab, is just great for the summer too.