| 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 | Players: 2-5 |
| ⏳ | Time: 10-25 mins |
| 🎂 | Ages: 10+ |
| ⚙️ | Mechanisms: Card Drafting, Placement |
“Hear ye!, hear ye! The King has declared a party…a COMBO party”
We’ve been playing Castle Combo from Pandasaurus Games. It’s a card drafting and placement game where you get exactly nine turns to gather nobles and townsfolk together into a 3 by 3 grid.
Each card you draft provides an instant benefit plus an end of game scoring goal, and it’s your job to pick the right ones to work together. After all, the word “combo” is in the name for a reason!
We like that you start the game by selecting one card, often chosen without too much thought, and then have to weave your strategy around it. The closer you get to the end of the game the trickier it feels, because every new card you add to your grid has to work with the others that you’ve placed.
Not every card on offer will be a perfect fit for your grid, but a big part of the fun is making the best of a bad situation. You can spend some of your resources to give yourself more options, but you have to weigh that risk up against just going for what’s in front of you.
We found it quite tough to plan in advance because the marketplace and your goals are constantly shifting. Being ready to pivot your plans as needed seems to be the way to go!
The theme and name do feel a bit uninspired, but the artwork is cute and thankfully the gameplay is more than good enough to make up for these shortcomings. You end up so busy trying to get the best score you can it sort of fades from your mind anyway.
For a nine turn game there’s actually a lot to think about here. It’s managed to strike just the right balance between being easy to get to the table and being able to keep us engaged right until the end.
This one is definitely worth checking out if you get the chance. Now excuse me while I go and try and break Steph’s win streak!
You can see this post on Instagram here and if you are interested you can find out more about the game on the Pandasaurus website!
The copy of Castle Combo used for this review was provided to A Tale of Two Meeples by Pandasaurus Games
The Boardgame Detective 