Thanks for your review ! I love the White Castle as a solo game and also this new expansion. What a gem ! Awesome mechanics, great artwork & production and a smooth & easy solo mode ! I never felt that you get clobbered by its solo mode (once you have a bit more experience with the game). With the base game, I currently win around 70% of my plays in the “hard mode” (but then I have more than 60 plays of White Castle under my belt…). With that in mind, the solo mode with the expansion feels a bit too easy for me so it is lacking somewhat in competitive tension. But I still love playing it and solving its puzzle, it just becomes more of a beat your own high score game (which I don’t mind either). The other point keeping in mind with the expansion: the base game alone is great because it is a crunchy Euro which is very compact and can be played in 40 min. With the expansion, the decision space becomes much larger and you have one more turn so this becomes a much longer game (competing in time with the larger games in my collection).
Thanks for the preview and your thoughts! I'm looking forward to receiving my copy. I didn't really have trouble with the solo mode on this and can even beat it on hard. I usually set up the game and then look at the board layout to see what inherit combos and synergy there is and then decide what difficulty level to play on (as the AI isn't held back by a lack of synergy in the setup). If this makes it too easy I could just ignore the giving up coins or giving up points to maintain the challenge. I'll give it a go as written and see how it feels. I'm mostly excited about the tea theme being incorporated. I think it's severely underused in board gaming. Congrats on your first The White Castle win!
@@JohnLaRuffa hey John, sorry to bring this up again, but I figure I'd tell you this in a comment that's relatively obscured from the general public here. There is a post on BGG called "US Gaymers, hang in there." It's politically loaded, and the moderators never took it down. Yet, they have been deleting comments all over the place *within* the thread. It's absolutely sick how recent historic events are infecting the BGG community even more disastrously than several years ago. BGG has to be called out on this. An example of an actual crazy comment left on that thread: "I Don't know if this will help anyone else or not but, something my therapist had me do is to make a list of permanent good things in my life that wouldn't change even if he got elected." CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS? Like, is this really happening to people?
Got matcha the other day, tried it and finally won a solo game. Who knew that tea could be so helpful
I really like it with the expansion. Just seems to be a fuller game!
@@JohnLaRuffa I like it when I draw a bot card that penalizes it. Even at “easy” the bot seems to have an unfair advantage otherwise.
@benabbottguitar Indeed!
Thanks for your review ! I love the White Castle as a solo game and also this new expansion. What a gem ! Awesome mechanics, great artwork & production and a smooth & easy solo mode !
I never felt that you get clobbered by its solo mode (once you have a bit more experience with the game). With the base game, I currently win around 70% of my plays in the “hard mode” (but then I have more than 60 plays of White Castle under my belt…). With that in mind, the solo mode with the expansion feels a bit too easy for me so it is lacking somewhat in competitive tension. But I still love playing it and solving its puzzle, it just becomes more of a beat your own high score game (which I don’t mind either).
The other point keeping in mind with the expansion: the base game alone is great because it is a crunchy Euro which is very compact and can be played in 40 min. With the expansion, the decision space becomes much larger and you have one more turn so this becomes a much longer game (competing in time with the larger games in my collection).
Wow! That is impressive on many levels!
I'm glad I picked it up. I do agree about the box size 😂.
Thanks for the preview and your thoughts! I'm looking forward to receiving my copy. I didn't really have trouble with the solo mode on this and can even beat it on hard. I usually set up the game and then look at the board layout to see what inherit combos and synergy there is and then decide what difficulty level to play on (as the AI isn't held back by a lack of synergy in the setup). If this makes it too easy I could just ignore the giving up coins or giving up points to maintain the challenge. I'll give it a go as written and see how it feels.
I'm mostly excited about the tea theme being incorporated. I think it's severely underused in board gaming. Congrats on your first The White Castle win!
Thanks! Yes, you could easily just ignore the cost of the cards as you said.
@@JohnLaRuffa hey John, sorry to bring this up again, but I figure I'd tell you this in a comment that's relatively obscured from the general public here. There is a post on BGG called "US Gaymers, hang in there." It's politically loaded, and the moderators never took it down. Yet, they have been deleting comments all over the place *within* the thread. It's absolutely sick how recent historic events are infecting the BGG community even more disastrously than several years ago. BGG has to be called out on this.
An example of an actual crazy comment left on that thread: "I Don't know if this will help anyone else or not but, something my therapist had me do is to make a list of permanent good things in my life that wouldn't change even if he got elected." CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS? Like, is this really happening to people?