Between Two Castles of Mad Kind Ludwig: Secrets and Soirees Expansion

A few years ago, we took a look at the fantastic Stonemaier title, Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig, which combined elements of the infamous games Between Two Cities, and Castles of Mad King Ludwig. We reviewed the game and really loved the castle building, tile laying aspect. And really, we had no complaints with the original game. The rules worked well, the components were of a superior quality – as they always are with Stonemaier – and the game was just fun to play. Who wouldn’t want to build not one, but two castles?! Stonemaier has done an excellent job over the years expanding their universes to bring in new ideas to old games, and released well priced expansions that greatly extend the shelf life of you favourite games. With the launch of Secrets and Soirees, that is once again the case.

Out of the Box

The quality in the original title is once again evident here, with thick cardboard pieces, a nice wooden castle token, and of course another awesome GameTrayz insert to hold all your pieces. Although I haven’t tried personally, I’ve heard the expansion will fit inside the original game box!

While Secrets and Soirees adds a few new gameplay mechanics, it also adds a ton of new rooms. That means more variety for placing within your castle when you start your next game, which is never a bad thing. These new tiles not only expand on what was already created, but provide more options, and brand new strategies to attempt to employ. It sounds silly to say a few new tiles can make that much of a difference, but it really does. And that’s how all expansions should work. I don’t want more of the same – I want something new, and this delivers that in spades.

First, there are new utility room bonus cards that will allow players to score points in different ways. This isn’t ground breaking stuff, but changing up the bonuses will make for slightly different game experiences, especially if you played the original multiple times.

There are two brand new rooms that bring new strategies to the game: activity rooms and secret rooms. Activity rooms score you points by surrounding it with other rooms, but there is always one catch: you don’t want to be eating beside a workout room, and you don’t want a bedroom next to a loud activity space. If you ever have one specific building type adjacent to the activity room you’ve placed, your activity room only scores one point. Tile placement is paramount here.

Secret rooms are equally as interesting. Secret rooms will have an arrow on them pointing in any specific direction, and they effectively copy the ability of the room they are pointing at. This is really beneficial when stringing together a number of rooms to score bonus points. How you use your secret rooms could be the difference between winning and losing any given game. The level of strategy here is very deep, even with introducing this one new tile type!

The expansion also comes with new rules to play a new version of the game, and while this new version actually doesn’t require you to own the expansion set – as it’s just a set of rules – I’m not sure this is the reason to purchase this expansion. Still, The Mad King’s Demands is an interesting new way to play the game. It removes the cooperative elements of building castles with your neighbouring players, and instead forces you to incorporate tiles picked by your neighbour into your own castle. It’s different, and scales well down to two players, which is often how my wife and I have been playing games during this pandemic. It is still a fun experience, but definitely won’t be for everyone.

There are also added solo modes variants, but we did not play those for this review.

Conclusion

So is this expansion worth it? If you’ve really enjoyed Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig, and want more than this is an easy recommendation. The new tiles and cards do change up the strategies you might use, so while the core concepts remain unchanged, how you approach the game will be different. If you were on the fence about the original game, adding what’s in the expansion likely isn’t going to change your mind. It’s not fixing anything that you might have felt was broken in the original. It’s just adding more. For our family, this would be an easy purchase every day of the week!