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The Palace Of Mad King Ludwig box art
2017 Ranked #2,704

The Palace Of Mad King Ludwig

Collaborative palace-building game where architects add rooms to a single grand Bavarian residence. Completed rooms form a surrounding moat and influence shifts with placement, so every design must enhance the palace while increasing your own control.

Family Games Post-Napoleonic Tile Placement Theme: Construction

Players

2-4

Play time

Not listed

Age

13+

Complexity

2.83/5

Rating

6.88

Harder to teach Highly interactive Deep strategy

Overview

At a glance

Is this game right for my group?

ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.

Teachability 2.4/5

Harder to teach

Replay value 4.1/5

High replayability

Interaction 3.8/5

Highly interactive

Player scaling 4.4/5

Scales well

Strategic depth 4.7/5

Deep strategy

See all 5 specifications

How it plays

How does it play?

Description from the publisher: King Ludwig II of Bavaria has called all great architects to design his greatest achievement: a world-renowned palace. Only the best will do!

Core mechanisms

Key systems that shape the decisions players make.

Read the full game description

Description from the publisher: King Ludwig II of Bavaria has called all great architects to design his greatest achievement: a world-renowned palace. Only the best will do! Gorgeous appointments, white stone, surrounded by water, with swans everywhere. Oh, and the Ludwig touch? All the architects must design the palace together. The designer who shows the strongest influence will receive the order to build it. In The Palace of Mad King Ludwig, each player builds rooms one at a time in a single gigantic palace. As rooms are completed, a moat slowly forms around the outside. Once the ends of the moat connect, the palace is finished, and the player who has contributed the most to the palace wins! In more detail, this sequel to Castles of Mad King Ludwig shares a few similarities to its predecessor, such as tile-laying, room rewards, and the magic of watching a unique palace take shape through the course of the game, but the gameplay is entirely different, with no auction, a clever endgame timer that graphically builds pressure for players as the moat slowly closes in around the palace, and a twist on resource management with multi-colored swan tokens being used as currency, points, and the keys to new abilities.

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Editions

Language and publisher variants currently recorded in the catalog.

Edition Year Language Publisher / Region
No editions imported yet.

Player resources

Rulebooks, player aids, FAQs, and solo resources.

No files imported yet.

Game and edition data

All specifications (5)

Play and group

Players
2–4
Best with
2–4
Play time
75 min
Age
13+
Complexity
2.8/5
Credits and catalog connections

Credits

Designers

1
Ted Alspach

Artists

1
Jason Boles

Publishers

2
Arclight Games Bézier Games

Linked items

No published linked games yet.