Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
One of the few disappointments I experienced during 2024’s SPIEL event in Essen, Germany happened on the second day of the show.
Despite meeting with our contact at Devir early in the weekend, I still wasn’t fast enough to grab a review copy of The White Castle: Matcha, the new expansion to The White Castle, my #6 game of 2023. At a show where I have sometimes grabbed as many as 50 new games, missing out on just one game shouldn’t have been much of a thing, right?
But I LOVED the base game. I loved the tension in each turn, thanks to the nine-turn structure. I loved the production. I loved the variability in set-up. I liked the solo variant. I loved the player aid on the back of the rulebook, despite the fact that I never really needed it.
Now, I didn’t always love the end-game scores. Depending on die rolls and player count, I sometimes finished a game with less than 40 points, in a game that comes with an “80+” points tracker. (I have never seen a player score more than 75 points in any of my six plays, across all player counts. This gave me a weird feeling: am I playing The White Castle badly? Inefficiently? Flat-out wrong?
I received a review copy of The White Castle: Matcha by mail recently, and this was so easy to table that I got three plays done in less than a week with my game groups. The verdict arrived on the fourth turn of my first review play: I love tea!
Tea Series
The White Castle: Matcha accommodates 1-4 players in a Euro-style engine-building game featuring a lot of different mechanisms: card drafting, a tableau builder that triggers using a clever dice mechanic, worker placement, dice placement, a mid-round income structure for two-thirds of the game’s rounds, and a few other odds and ends. The base game is required to play this expansion.
If you have not tried the base game, you can check out my review of The White Castle for a longer snapshot of the rules. The main addition with the expansion is tied to a small board that now sits below the main board, with a fourth dice bridge, new light-green dice, and a new resource: chasen, which Gemini tells me is a bamboo utensil used to whisk tea powder (in the case of this game, matcha) into water to make tea.
Players now have four resources to manage (chasen, mother-of-pearl, food, iron), along with four worker types: gardeners, warriors, courtiers, and geishas. The Geisha action works just like the Courtier action, albeit in a different location. Players can spend two coins to place a geisha on the entrance to the Tea Garden, the new area on the left side of the expansion board. Then, two or five chasen can be spent to move a geisha one or two steps, respectively, along the Path of Tea.
The Path of Tea is great, because it seamlessly combines the best things about each of the game’s other actions and significantly spikes the scoring potential in each game.
Lantern Lightning
If a player chooses, they can move one (and only one, each game) geisha to the left on the Path of Tea, into a space called the Pond Overlook. Doing that buries that geisha for the rest of the game at this location, but then this geisha functions just like a gardener from the base game. Upon placement, the player gets a one-time bonus or an action that becomes available for a one-time cost. If there are any dice remaining on the green dice bridge at the end of rounds one or two, the player gets to trigger the geisha at the Pond Overlook again.
Moving the geisha right offers a three-step path. The first step of the path feels like a must with this new content—this moves a geisha onto a space that allows them to immediately activate a bonus showing on one of two face-up cards in the “Outskirts of Himeji.” The bonus is always useful, be it extra resources, coins, or Daimyo seals. Then, the player chooses one of the two cards in the Outskirts of Himeji and immediately adds it to their Lantern section.
Yes, this means the expansion speeds up the ability to add cards to one of my favorite engine-building mechanics in gaming. It basically uses the ability of the courtiers to push cards into a player’s engine, then skips the step that requires a player to move a card first into their personal domain area before moving it down to the Lantern area.
By the end of each play of The White Castle: Matcha, I had at least six cards in the Lantern area, which constantly pushed me to grab the left-most die regardless of its die face so I could trigger a handsome river of bonuses.
In a four-player game, this makes the Path of Tea a gold rush, one that I expect future expansions to address with more cards. As it is, there are only 16 cards split across the two spaces in the Outskirts of Himeji. In my three- and four-player games, those cards got snapped up quickly!
Moving geisha further to the right, past this first space, eventually offers players a chance to bury their geishas in the Tea House. In this area, players get the best of the warrior action—in addition to a one-time bonus, geishas that end inside the tea house grant a bonus score to one of the three other worker types. So, if you are going hard on courtiers in a particular game, you can really spike the scoring on those workers if you place two geishas in that section of the Tea House. (Players are limited to a max of two geishas in any single section of the Tea House.)
So, the geishas make every other thing in the game more valuable. Everyone who goes to the Path of Tea will experience higher scores. Some of the actions in other parts of the board will reward players who utilize the geisha action. The personal domain that services geishas feeds itself. By that, I mean unlike the other three personal domain actions, the cost to do geisha actions and the bonuses on that track are all tied to chasen. So, using a green die to trigger the personal domain leads to a river of additional chasen, which can be used to activate geisha actions on back-to-back turns.
YESSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!
4:3 Ratio
The White Castle: Matcha adds all of this without a significant hit to the rules overhead, which I was mildly shocked to find during my first multiplayer game. There are more spaces, with the ability to use the black, white and/or orange dice in the expansion board’s action spaces to trigger use of the geisha action or the new Outskirts of Himeji area.
But the only major structural change to The White Castle with this expansion is the rule that got most players riled up during the base game—now, each round lasts four turns per player, instead of three.
This made everyone who played both versions of the game very, very happy. Even though I’m the stick in the mud who liked the nine-turn structure of the base game, the masses have spoken. More turns in a short game means that The White Castle: Matcha is still relatively short, but significantly more interesting for players seeking to top 100 points consistently and experience an engine that will really be humming by the 11th or 12th turn of each play.
I think this is a good thing. I’m not in “I’ll only play The White Castle with the expansion” territory, but I can absolutely see why many players—and the designers!—will only play The White Castle if Matcha is included.
For one of my plays, I taught a player the rules for both the base game and the expansion, and he picked up the combined rule set just fine. Experienced players will pick this new expansion up quickly. At four players, The White Castle: Matcha is a 90-minute experience, which is still reasonable. With two players, it took about an hour, with the person new to the system. We both agreed that a second play would shave 15-20 minutes off that playtime.
The only negative I can level against The White Castle: Matcha is the complaint I have with most Devir expansions to their base games: the base game box was so compact that the base game barely fit, so there’s no chance to fit all the new stuff into one box. One option, if you are committed to never playing with the base game again? Tossing the old player boards into the bin, since they can’t be used with the expansion content.
Otherwise, the decision space here is easy. If you liked the base game, you need to pick up The White Castle: Matcha right now. I can already imagine this game staying in my collection permanently!
Add Comment