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Dragon Castle is a game freely inspired by Mahjong Solitaire. During your turn, you take a pair of identical tiles from the central "castle" (known as the Dragon Castle) and place them on your own realm board to build your own castle. From time to time, you may sacrifice these tiles to acquire shrines in their place.
Every time you create a set of tiles of the same kind, you "consolidate" them, i.e. flip them face down to score points. When you consolidate a set, you may also build shrines on top of the consolidated tiles: Shrines allow you to score more points, but they also limit your building options. You may also take advantage of the available spirit card and its game-changing powers...but this will come at a cost! Finally, don't forget to check the dragon card in play, and to follow the building requirements to score bonus points.
When the Dragon Castle has been reduced to only one floor, the end of the game is triggered. After one final round, the player with the most points is the lord of the new Dragon Castle... and the winner of the game!
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I used to play Mahjong a lot when I was younger, first with a dinky cardboard version and then when I was older and spied it in store, a proper version with tiles. I did play against others more than play solitaire and even though I haven't played the game in years I have kept my set. This game promised to be a sort of backwards mahjong and that was enough to have me feeling like buying a copy of the game. Pro - the tiles in this are just like the ones in my traditional set. They're solid, feel great and look good. Con - so much thought was put into everything else and then the player boards are just a thin cardstock, something thicker would have felt so much better.
The idea here, is that you take a pair off the castle you've built and start creating your own castle. When you make a set (minimum of 4), you flip them over and then you can either place a shrine on top of at least one of these or wait to place more tiles on top, as the higher your tower (score maximum for three tiles high) the more points you get at the end of the game. The different colours also alter how many shrines you can place, and if you are strategic enough, you may be able to flip over more than four tiles, thus increasing your score. I've played this a few times and overall love the feel of it and that it will be different each time as you place the tiles on the main castle at random. Though I haven't played with any of the dragon cards yet, I can see myself holding onto this for a while yet.
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