Castle V Castle: A sleek, fast-paced card game featuring robots, witches, and self-aware apocalyptic signs

I can’t be certain, but the music for Castle V Castle sounds very much like it was made on an old Roland TR-808 drum machine or equivalent plug-in. Your ears will be familiar with the 808 even if your brain isn’t – it’s about as ubiquitous in hip hop as the Amen break. That’s actually quite fitting, because this minimalist strategy game has the rhythms of a call-and-response rap battle. That’s something you could say for all I-go-you-gos to an extent, but the bellicose back and forth here is especially sizzling, snappy, and scintillating.

(The game music is very different from the trailer music.)

You’ve got three Mates in the Castle (MCs for short): a witch, a knight, and a hard hatted builder. Each generates different resources each turn – magic, weapons, bricks. The cards in your hands cost resources from one those three categories, and you play or discard one a turn. Your goal is to either smash your opponent’s castle to bits or build yours up 25 bricks high. Some cards boost your castle or attack your opponent’s, some level up your MCs so they produce more resources a turn, some steal your foe’s resources or block their next card, and some summon a giant robot with a ten-turn countdown after which it absolutely decimates the opposing structure. You could pretend it’s made of goat poo and superstition juice if you wanted to stay immersed in the middle ages, I suppose. Uh, the builder’s hard hat is made of… congealed acorn porridge? Sure, that’ll do.

Very simple, very minimal, but you will get donked in the donkables very quickly if you just haphazardly sling cards like a malfunctioning shuffler that is also shit at videogames. I found a good tac was to play one category until I was out of cards and move on to the next. Spend a few turns building up and buffing, then go all out offensive, that sort of thing. The danger here is trapping yourself in a position where you’re stumped into either hording resources, or making space in your limited hand for more cards by discarding for multiple turns. A few goes is all it takes for a towering bastion of victory to crumble into a ruin barely more structurally sound than a bag of blueprints and regret. When a castle is down to its last few bricks, a sign on legs that reads “the end is nigh” waddles over and then leaves again if the castle gets repaired.

Needless to say I’m in love with how Castle V Castle looks, too. I’ve started really appreciating minimalism in both digital and physical games after spending many years backing massive, billion-miniature Kickstarters and playing obscenely large 4X games. So when I spy the digital equivalent of one of Grey Gnome’s lovely games in a tin, I’m chuffed. This one is funded by Slay the Spire‘s Casey Yano and developed by Nopopo (I agree). You can find the demo here.