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Castles of Mad King Ludwig Royal Collector’s Edition By Ted Alspach | Founder & CEO of Bezier Games, Inc.
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n 2014, Bezier Games launched Castles of Mad King Ludwig. As a very small publisher, this was our 2nd big box game, following the release of Suburbia a few years before. Just like most small publishers, we did everything we could to get the game produced, but our budget was incredibly tiny. Artwork and graphic design in particular ended up getting shorted, but the game was still incredibly well received, and since its publication it has sold more than 100,000 copies. We started working on a collector’s edition for Castles in 2018, commissioning much better artwork, great graphic design, and determined which of the many expansions that were in development might be ready for it. Of those, the Towers and Royal Decree expansions were deemed to be the most viable, and so we had art created for them and started serious development on both of them, as well as rethinking how the the game’s table presence should be, and what if anything would be special about the Collector’s Edition. We wanted everything to be special about this edition, so we hired a 3D artist to create plastic painted towers that replicated the design of the 8 castles that Ludwig either built or lived in during his life. That same 3D artist created new plastic swan player tokens. We decided early on that the swan player tokens needed to feel solid, but instead of just making them solid plastic, we embedded a chunk of metal into each of them, making them feel really good to handle, and also ensuring that they wouldn’t tip over easily. Our graphic designer designed new coins, which are incredibly detailed and reflective of the time Ludwig was alive in the mid 1800’s. And like coins at that time, we made these 3mm thick…much thicker
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than metal coins you’ll find with other special editions of games, so they are easy to pick up, move, and stack onto room tiles in the market. Because the Favor tokens now had a dual purpose with the new Towers expansion, we made them all heavilyweighted poker chips…the same weight that the first edition of Splendor had, which is as premium as you can get. We included the limited Polish expansion set of rooms, and also created a whole new group of rooms that were new to this edition. We also looked at anything else we thought could use improvement based on the feedback we had gotten for the game and its Secrets expansion over the years. Gone were the zig zag scoreboard, multi-piece market/ room storage boards and long setup times for including the Swans portion of Secrets, being replaced with a single scoreboard and a better way to include swans that didn’t require any setup time. People had long wanted to play Castles with 5 players, and while there weren’t enough components in the original game to do that, we made sure it was possible with this new edition. Finally, we turned our attention to the rules. We made the expansions color coded so it would be easy to find the rules for the expansions you are playing with, and provided all sorts of great examples and detailed setup pages to make learning and referencing rules as easy as possible. To top off the Royal Collector’s Edition, there are GameTrayz to store all of the components in a way that makes the game quick and easy to setup. The Royal Collector’s Edition was a limited print run, and there are only so many still available, so be sure to get yours now!
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beziergames.com
11/2/22 1:59 PM
