Ruin the Castles of Burgundy for Yourself with These Easy Tricks
By Jake Frydman
I played Castles of Burgundy 100 times so you don’t have to! In this strategy guide, I’ll share a few tips to make your estate the envy of all.
Gameplan
First, we need a gameplan. Our strategy is simple. Fill up as much of our personal player board as possible. It’s possible to leave just 6 empty spots or fewer, so let’s aim for that. Everything we do over the course of the game should be in service of this overarching goal. This works because, despite what I’m going to say below, Castles of Burgundy is a finely balanced game. With all else being equal, the player who plays the most tiles has a great shot at winning. Heuristics!
Tip 1: Take and Place
As a general rule, we always want to use our dice to take and place tiles. In a distant 3rd is the selling goods action, which gives us 1 silver (half a tile). This is a fine thing to do when taking and placing is not available. Worst of all is the gaining workers action. In an ideal world, we would never take this action. In reality, you probably have to take the workers action once or twice, but you should know it’s bad when you do.
Tip 2: Get a mine in the first round.
Leaving the first round with one or, dare we dream, multiple mines is the best thing you can do to set yourself up to win the game. If there is a mine available on the first turn, I will gladly expend all of my worker resources available to grab it.
A first round mine will earn 4 silver over the course of the game, two free actions. There is a huge gulf between a first and second round mine. Not only will it generate half a tile more in resources, but you will have that extra silver in hand earlier where it can help you get even further ahead. That isn’t to say that mines aren’t worth it in the 2nd or 3rd round, but to point out how important it is to get one in round 1, if possible.
Remember, our plan is to get as many tiles down as possible. Silver generation supercharges our strategy.
Tip 3: Prioritize Tiles* that Serve Our Gameplan
There are no bad tiles in Castles of Burgundy, which is why our plan works, but some tiles facilitate our gameplan better than others. Here are some tiles I try to prioritize taking and a few to avoid. Don’t be crazy about this list, I’d rather take a tile listed here as “avoid” than use the taking workers action. Even a bad tile placed is still helping us fill our board.
The unlisted tiles are the ones you are happy to take, but you won’t go out of your way for.
Prioritize (Roughly Ordered)
Mines
Castles
These Buildings
Tier 1: Estate, Bank, Boarding House
Tier 2: Church, Market, Carpenter’s Workshop
These Science Tiles
Science Tile 2: Mines generate a worker
Science Tile 3: Selling goods gives an extra silver
Science Tile 4: Selling goods give an extra worker
Boats
Avoid
Watchtower Building. This tile is fine, but we’d much rather use the building space on our player board for one of the premier buildings above.
Science 13 and 14. These improve the workers' actions. Because we are avoiding that action like the plague, these tiles don’t serve our gameplan.
Tip 4: Keep Your Options Open
Our gameplan means we are electing to navigate the game in something of a straightjacket, and so we have to be really smart about using the flexibility inherent in the game system to our full advantage. Here are two major things we can do to increase the options available to us on a given turn.
First, we should place tiles onto an available duplicate number space when possible. By this I mean that if the legal placement spaces on your board contain duplicates of the same number, prioritize placing tiles on those numbers. This will help give you as many live rolls as possible to place tiles on future turns.
Second, try to always end the round with at least two empty storage spaces on your board. This will ensure that all of your rolls are live to take tiles at the beginning of the next round, when you will have the most tiles to select from.This means that over the course of each of the game’s 5 rounds, you should be a little more “take” heavy at the beginning and a little more “place” heavy towards the end.
Tip 5: How To Boat Race
The boats are one of the most strategically and tactically complex parts of the game with a lot to consider and explore. Here are a few thoughts on how to play them.
Castles of Burgundy is in the lineage of Euro games where turn order matters a lot. We want to lead in turn order so that as many tile options as possible are available to us on our turn. This increases our odds of live rolls and decreases the need to spend workers to claim tiles.
Counterintuitively, perhaps, racing to the end of the boat track is actually not the best. While this achieves this first goal, boats provide a second important purpose to our strategy by keeping our stock of goods tiles full. We want a diverse set of goods available to us as a pressure release valve for when we are inevitably unable to take or place a tile. Racing to the end of the boat track will provide fewer goods tiles and eliminate our ability to refill when we do sell.
Our goal with boats then is to be ahead on the boat race by just one space or, even better, ahead on the same space and the ability to quickly reclaim the lead. Having the lead in turn order and a boat in a storage space is a powerful position to leverage. As soon as someone passes us for the lead, we can play our boat and minimize our time out of pole position to a single turn. .
Finally, it really matters when you are in the lead of turn order. Being first to act at the beginning of a new round with freshly deployed tiles is a huge advantage. Being first to act at the end of the round, when we are focusing on deploying tiles, generally won’t matter much.
Conclusion
And that’s everything you will ever need to know about how to play Castles of Burgundy…
would be a foolish and outlandish thing to say!
The truth is that I hope these tips help bring you up to speed and invite you into the true fun of the game, which is navigating the emergent nuances between these simple heuristics and evaluating when to break away from them entirely. To do that well you’ll have to play the game 100 times yourself, and I recommend that you do.
*The tile set discussed here is based on the first edition tile set. The anniversary edition includes an incredibly overpowered tile (#6) that is the highest priority tile in the game by far.
