What The Castles of Burgundy is
The Castles of Burgundy is a digital version of Stefan Feld's board game from Ravensburger. The setting is the Loire Valley in the 15th Century, where players act as influential princes trading and building to bring their estates to prominence. Two dice decide which actions are available each turn, but you make the final choice yourself. You can trade, farm livestock, build in the city, or carry out scientific research, and there are many different ways to collect victory points. Planning ahead matters round after round, and the estates differ so that no two games play out the same way. At the end of the game the player with the most victory points wins.
Playing with your group
You can play against the AI or against other people, with cross-platform play against all opponents. Ranked and casual games are both available, and there is a world ladder using a GLICKO rating. If your group wants to play offline, you can do that alone or with friends, and asynchronous play is supported with notifications, so nobody has to be online at the same moment. There are also fast ranked games when you want a live experience. Three AI opponents are included at easy, medium and hard difficulty, which is handy for filling seats or learning the systems before facing real players.
Before you start
A tutorial walks you through the rules, so it is worth running through it first if you have not played the physical game. The dice introduce randomness, but your decisions carry the game, so expect to weigh short-term gains against longer plans. The estate layouts change between games, which keeps the strategy varied but also means patterns from one game do not transfer directly to the next. The game is available in English, German, French, Spanish, Korean, Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Russian and Italian. Remote Play Together is supported, and ten new avatars are added to your DIGIDICED collection.