Between Two Castles: Secrets & Soirees Expansion

Does the expansion fit in the original game box?

Yes! We designed Secrets & Soirees to specifically to fit in the original box.

How will the sleeping rooms be impacted by the new room type?

Here’s how we say it in the expansion rulebook: “Sleeping rooms score 4 points if your castle has any 6 other regular room types by the end of the game. It must have at least 6 out of the following 7 types: activity, corridor, downstairs, food, living, outdoor, and utility (not including sleeping). IMPORTANT: Specialty rooms, secret rooms, and sleeping rooms do not count toward the 6 other room types to score points for sleeping rooms.”

Shouldn’t the base scores in the example on page 8 of the Automa rulebook be 32 instead of 30?

Yes, they should. As a result, the total should be 54 instead of 52.

Shouldn’t the icons in the illustrations for steps 4 and 5 of the Automa setup instructions (Automa rulebook, page 2) have living room and corridor icons?

Yes, they should. In the first printing they erroneously have activity room and outdoor icons.

May 12: A Personal Variant and the Full Rulebooks

Before I link to the rulebooks at the end of today’s final design diary, there’s one specific portion of the rulebook I wanted to highlight: A personal castle variant called The Mad King’s Demand.

The core feature of Between Two Castles is the partnership mechanism (you’re working with the player on your right to build a castle and the player on your left to build a castle, and the lower-scoring of those two castles indicates your end-game score).

However, I think the other mechanisms in the game stand on their own as a compelling tile-drafting, tile-placement game, so I recommended to Ben and Matthew that we release an official variant that lets each player create their own castle (no partnership).

The game operates almost identically to the core game, except you have a castle in front of you and only you are placing tiles in that castle. However, there’s a clever twist from the designers: Instead of keeping both tiles you choose for yourself, you must give one of those tiles to your neighbor (left in round one, right in round two).

So in round one, each time you place tiles, you’re placing 1 tile you selected and 1 tile selected for you by the player on your right. This adds an special layer of interaction to the draft.

I’m curious to hear what people think of this variant or if they’ll just stick to the core partnership rules.

Speaking of rules, I’ve uploaded the core rulebook and Automa rulebook here for you to download and read: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/o27dfx0cnku733r/AADv4g9CHXsyobSSVxyTjsA9a?dl=0

Also, while this is the last design diary, you’ll soon see posts about the expansion from advance-copy reviewers before the May 26 preorder so you can decide if the expansion is a good fit for you. The preorder will ship in June, and you’ll see more reviewer opinions in the months that follow (leading up to the retail release in late July).

May 11: More Stuff!

I love expansions where you can just shuffle everything into the core game components and not worry about separating everything out for future games. Secrets & Soirees is very much that type of expansion, and in the spirit of it, we included more stuff: More regular room tiles, more bonus cards, and another throne room.

The throne room, of course, was necessary, because this expansion increases the player count up to 8 players:

Ben and Matthew added bonus cards to cover activity rooms and to look at specific wall hangings, among other things:

They also added 3 each of the original regular room types, for a total of 21 new tiles:

I know, this is a simple post, but sometimes simple is good! I’ll be back tomorrow with one last reveal, as well as links to the rulebooks.

May 10: Automa Solo Mode and Components

Jamey here, just briefly, as Morten Monrad Pedersen has written most of today’s post. When we embarked on this journey to make an expansion for Between Two Castles, the highest priority for me was to include a robust solo mode. Over the years, Automa has become synonymous with every new game we release, but Between Two Castles was the exception.

Well, no more! Secrets & Soirees actually has two ways to play solo: default and “introvert” mode. Morten delves into his thought process behind the process of creating the primary mode below, and as an introvert myself, I’ll end with some info about the introvert mode.

The Extrovert Solo Mode

Since I started working with Stonemaier all our games have been solo playable out of the box – except Between Two Castles.

There are two reasons for why that is. The first one is that when B2Castles was being made there were more games and expansions that needed solo modes than my team and I had the time to handle, so we had to choose one project to skip.

It might seem like it would be a no-brainer to choose another game to skip than B2Castles because we already had a solo mode for Between Two Cities and the two games share a lot of DNA. So, it should be easier to extend the B2Cities solo mode to B2Castles than to come up with a completely new solo mode for another game.

Technically, that’s correct, but the Automas (artificial opponents) in B2Cities are pushing it in terms of effort it takes to handle for the human player and a direct port to the heavier game, B2Castles, would push that effort beyond what I was comfortable with and at the time I didn’t have any good ideas for how to overcome the workload issue.

CARDBOARD AND HUMANS DON’T MIX WELL

The feature of the solo mode that made it complex and time consuming is the system used to pick tiles for the two Automas during the tile drafting phases and spending time on the turns of the Automas is not as fun as spending time on your own turn.

Since Automas are cardboard opponents, which have the intelligence of, well, cardboard it’s hard for them to make intelligent choices in complex situations. In our other solo modes, we can overcome this to a large extent by simplifying the game the Automa’s play. E.g. in Scythe the Automa doesn’t have a faction mat, upgrades, or resources, and they do movement following a different rule set than human players which removes a lot of the complexity that a full-blown AI would have.

In Between Two Cities/Castles we don’t have that luxury because the Automas are building a city they share with you and so need to make decisions within the full human-player ruleset.

It occurred to me that we could move that complexity into the player’s own decision process. Doing this would turn the execution of a complicated “AI script” with no player decisions into an interesting decision for the player.

Normally, it’s a big no-no for us to let the human player make decisions on behalf of the Automas because it forces the player to ignore what is best for them to decide what’s best for their opponent and I don’t like doing that. It takes me out of the play experience to have to play in opposition to myself and for me there’s no tension in finding out whether Morten or Morten wins.

COOPERATION MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE

The Between Two X games are different, though, because the players cooperate in building their shared city and therefore it makes sense for one player to advise another and so the human player will not have to make decisions for an opponent to their own detriment.

This would not only turn following a complicated script into an interesting choice, it would also ensure that the Automas make better choices, because while both humans and Automas are carbon-based lifeforms, we assumed that most human players will make better decisions than cardboard.

Having the human make the choice fully on behalf of an Automa would feel wrong, though, because that would go beyond the advice giving of human-only games. Therefore, the B2Castles system makes the human mark two tiles as suggestions and the Automa then chooses between those two.

MAKING DECISIONS ON THEIR OWN

This doesn’t remove the complexity of the Automas choosing tiles for the castle/city they share with each other because as mentioned we don’t want the human player to make decisions on behalf of opponents that go against the human’s best interest. Therefore, the Automas needed rules for making these decisions on their own and so we were back to the issue of tile selection that would be too complex if ported from B2Cities.

To make that part of their decision process simpler we made the scoring of their shared castle (Roburg) simpler by handling all tile types the same way instead of each type following different rules similar to those of the human player as we did in B2Cities.

Well, it’s not quite true that they’re all the same because the secret room tiles have a single extra rule to handle their “wild card” nature.

EXTROVERT AND INTROVERT

In Between Two Cities we had two solo modes, Simple and Full. Full mode is the one I’ve talked about above and Simple is a much, well, simpler system.

We decided to do the same for B2Castles. One that mimics a 3-player mode and a much simpler one that is quite different from the multiplayer game. In the simple mode you have a single castle of your own and play against a single artificial opponent that also has a single castle. This mode is simpler, faster, more puzzly, allows you to slightly manipulate your opponent, and isn’t intended to mimic the multi-player experience.

Since you in the Full mode partially cooperate with the Automas in building castles while in the Simple mode you build a single one on your own, I came up with the names Extrovert and Introvert for the two modes as a bit of silliness.

As the development went along it became clear that most players preferred the Extrovert mode (about two thirds if I remember correctly) and it’s the mode that’s trying to mimic the human-only game. Therefore, we decided that it should be the primary mode, but the naming scheme with Extrovert and Introvert undermined this by making them sound like equals. To avoid this, we removed the Extrovert name and explained it as the solo mode of the game. The Introvert mode was semi-relabeled as a variant at the end of the rulebook clearly setting it apart.

This note in the Automa variant also describes what to expect from the “introvert” Automa mode:

“Introvert is a variant that is quite different from the multiplayer game. You have a single castle on your own and play against a single artificial opponent that also has one castle. This variant is simpler, faster, more puzzly, and allows you to slightly manipulate your opponent.

This variant is neither intended to mimic the multiplayer game, nor the Mad King’s Demand variant from the core expansion rulebook.”

You’ll soon see the full rules for Castles Automa (along with the core rulebook)–just a few more days of reveals! Are you looking forward to playing Between Two Castles solo?

May 9: Promo Tiles, Scoring, and Reference Cards

Whenever we make an expansion with cardboard pieces or tiles, there’s inevitably a little extra room on the punchboards, and we don’t like that space to go to waste. So in Secrets & Soirees, we used that extra space to add two rooms that were previously only available as promo tiles (the Dice Tower Room and the Saxophone Room [for the Game Boy Geek]):

Given the addition of the new rooms, we also thought it wise to reprint the scorepad and reference cards. The scorepad works just like in the original game: Each player gets their own sheet (which are double-sided to account for 2 games), and you’ll score each of the rooms in your castle one by one.

The scoring process can take a few minutes, but in the rulebook we recommend the incredible scoring app called Mad King’s Steward. The app uses augmented reality to see all of the rooms in your castle and score it automatically for you–you can just pass one phone around the table to calculate all scores this way. It’s pretty magical.

We provided Rocco–the developer of this app–with files for the expansion so he could update it with the new tiles, and the new version of Mad King’s Steward is already available (some of the advance copy reviewers are using it). It only works on iOS, but there’s another app developer working on an Android version (Castle Appraiser).

Last, here’s the reference card, of which we include 8 copies (1 per player). Isn’t it convenient when you have your own personal reference card/guide instead of needing to pass one around the table? :)

I’m excited about tomorrow, as that’s when Morten will reveal all of the details about the new Automa solo mode for Between Two Castles!

May 8: Secret Rooms

I have a confession: I’ve always wanted a secret passage in my house. Something straight out of the movies: You pull at a leather-bound book, and the bookcase slides open to reveal a passage or room hidden within the walls.

Until the day I make this dream come true, I have the secret rooms in the Castles expansion. Each secret room has 3 arrows that all point in one direction (up, down, left, or right, depending on the tile). Those arrows effectively say, “Copy these elements of the adjacent room in this direction.”

For example, if I have a Game Room to the left of Behind the Bookcase, the secret room is now an activity room with swords as its wall hanging and corridors as the room type it doesn’t want to be near.

I can place these tiles in any order: If I placed Behind the Bookcase first, it would remain unassigned until I placed the Game Room to the left of it.

In fact, you can even string together secret rooms to create a “secret passage” in which they all become the tile at the end of the passage:

Secret rooms don’t have their own completion goals for sets of 3 or 5 in your castle, as they become other tile types for the purpose of these sets. So in the above example, I have 4 total downstairs rooms.

To make it easier to remember the room type of each secret room, we included room type tokens that you’ll place on the secret rooms. There aren’t room type tokens for speciality rooms, though, as secret rooms can’t duplicate the extravagance of those special tiles.

And of course there’s a place in the Game Trayz insert for the room type tokens:

I’m eager to hear the stories that result from the secret rooms in your castle! Which of the secret rooms shown here would you most like in your real home someday?

May 7: Activity Rooms and Ballrooms

Let’s jump right into one of the big gameplay additions for this expansion, activity rooms and ballrooms–this is the “soirees” part of Secrets & Soirees.

Activity Rooms are places for creative expression, to the benefit of those nearby. So for each tile orthogonally adjacent, you gain 1 point (i.e., a max of 4 points for 4 adjacent rooms). However, placing a sleeping room next to a boisterous activity room is ill-advised; if you do that, the activity room will only score exactly 1 total point.

A few of my favorite activity rooms (thematically) are the escape room, climbing room, game room, and Festivus room. The artists put a lot of little details and Easter Eggs in the art for these rooms, which I love!

When you have 3 activity rooms in a castle, that castle instantly also gains a Ballroom. Unlike previous speciality rooms in the game, the ballroom tiles are randomized–each looks for a different type of room. You’ll draw 3 and pick 1 (remove the other 2 from the game).

The ballroom offers something unique to the game: It doesn’t look at rooms in the same castle as the ballroom itself. Instead, it looks for a specific type of tile in both adjacent castles (remember, one of those adjacent castles is controlled by you, but the other is not). Thematically, you’re holding a ball and inviting people from neighboring castles. This leads to a new type of player interaction in the game, as you might make choices based on ballrooms in nearby castles.

When Ben and Matthew shared this idea with me, I was instantly drawn to it. Between Two Castles can take up a lot of table space with larger groups, so it’s not really feasible to look at castles all the way across the table. But it’s fine to look at an adjacent castle.

I’m excited about this new pair of rooms, and I look forward to sharing more information about the expansion tomorrow!

May 6: The Beginning, a New Beginning, and Everything in One Box

There were two reasons I reached out to Ben Rosset and Matthew O’Malley about creating an expansion to Between Two Castles: One, the game was released back in 2018, so it was past due for us to support fans of the game with an expansion. Two, I wanted to highlight the game for those who weren’t already familiar with it (and those who weren’t drawn to the original due to it’s inability to play solo).

So before I tell the story of Secrets & Soirees, for that second group of people I want to let you know what Between Two Castles actually is. It’s a competitive, tile-drafting game in which each player is building two castles out of those tiles: One castle with the player on your left and one castle with the player on your right. At the end of the game, you’re represented by the lower scoring of your two castles.

The result looks something like this:

Also, why the oddly long name for the game? Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig? The original design drew a lot of inspiration from the game Castles of Mad King Ludwig, so we licensed the IP from Bezier Games.

Thus when Ben and Matthew started working on the example, they had source material to draw inspiration from: Specifically, elements of Castles of Mad King Ludwig that hadn’t made it into the original Between Two game (like activity rooms) and elements of the Castles expansion (like secret rooms). They also simply added more stuff: 3 new tiles in each of the original 7 categories of tiles and 8 new bonus cards.

These additions actually meant that when playing with the expansion, the game can now go up to a total of 8 players (not likely during the pandemic, but it’s a handy option for those of you with big families and big tables). Hence the addition of a Wartburg Castle token:

Finally, I gave Ben and Matthew one big constraint: The expansion had to fit into the original game box. That’s not always a helpful design constraint–please remember this when you badger publishers about expansions fitting into the box–but in this case it seemed perfectly feasible.

Fortunately, Noah at Game Trayz had left a specific space in the original box for an expansion insert, and Matthew made sure the expansion components could fit into it (with a few tiles fitting into the “spillover” slots in the original insert). You can see here how the expansion insert (purple) wraps around the top insert (gold) in the core game.

By the way, these nice photos are provided by Tim Chuon.

That’s all for today, and I’ll be back tomorrow to discuss some of the new mechanisms in the expansion. If you have any questions about the stories above, I’m happy to answer them in the comments!

May 5: The Announcement

I’ll start diving into the details of the expansion tomorrow, but you can see plenty of information in today’s Facebook Livecast, provided below on YouTube: