Knowledge Base

In a departure from my ordinary content, here's something interesting my gaming group assembled over this past weekend.

The board game Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a great board game. It's a mashup of Between Two Cities and The Castles of Mad King Ludwig. For those of you who have played it enough to understand it well and want to try something ridiculously awesome and time-consuming, here's my set of house rules:

MegaTower rules

1. Play phases of equal numbers of rooms per player until you run out of rooms to do this equally. The phases start with 9 rooms each like normal. Obviously you will get the most phases and turns if you play with only 3 players.
2. At the beginning of the game, the players as a group may agree on up to 2 room types that can be built below grade in addition to normal. Suggestions: yellow, orange.
3. You may have up to two outside (blue border) rooms on top of a column.
4. Bonuses for number of same room type happen at 3, 6, and 8 rooms: you get the regular room bonus at 3 and 6, and the choose-shield-bonus at 8 (normally 5). If you happen to miss accumulating a bonus during a turn, then you forfeit that bonus.
5. You can choose to delay any bonus until the end of the phase (running out of room in the hand). If you forget to execute a bonus at the end of a phase, you forfeit that bonus. You may play the bonus at any point before the end of the phase; that is, you do not have to wait until the end of the phase.
6. At the end of each phase numbered N, you may rearrange up to N+1 rooms, while following all the normal rules of placement. Rooms can only be transposed; you cannot take up a new slot or leave a gap where there was a room before. This can occur before or after rule 5.

Color commentary

1. If you have an even number of rooms in a phase, the players may decide to either make everyone play the last 2 rooms or discard the last 2 rooms. But who would choose to skip?!
2. Yellow (food) rooms and orange (utility) rooms are the most on-theme for being below ground, and also seemed the most dependent on being near downstairs rooms. But the players may agree on up to any two additional room types.
3. This facilitates lots of gardens stacked on top of each other. Also, double tower turrets on top of pretty much everything drains the entire stack of bonus rooms but feels so good points-wise!
4. straightforward
5. Forgetting a bonus is really annoying! Don't do it. The way delaying a bonus works is: if you accumulate a yellow bonus (draw 5 rooms and place one), go ahead and draw the 5 rooms now and set them aside until when you plan on playing that bonus. If you forget about them though, and the phase ends, you have to put all five face-down rooms back! For an orange bonus, draw the 3 bonus cards and leave them face-down until you wish to play them.
6. Don't allow yourself to get stuck in analysis paralysis. Your group might decide to implement a time limit for this rearrangement operation.

Disclaimers

I am in no way related to whoever publishes this board game. I was not paid to make these statements. If somebody wishes to pay me for talking about this game and stretching it to its limits, you can find my email address.