Castle Conflict

How to Play — Castle Conflict

Objective: Be the first to defeat the enemy Ruler by tearing down their castle, while defending your own. You play against the computer.

Setup

Each side has its own 52-card deck. One King or Queen is set aside as that side's Ruler. The rest is shuffled; each side draws a starting hand of 6 cards.

Your Turn

Each turn you get 2 actions, chosen from:

• Play card(s) onto the board — build a structure, fortify one, or arm a weapon
• Draw cards up to a hand size of 6
• Discard a single card
• Discard your whole hand and roll a die for a fresh one
• Reshuffle your discard pile back into your draw pile
• Attack with an armed weapon

Building the Castle

Red cards build structures. The Wall needs 5 single red cards (one per segment) — no red card matching your Ruler's rank may be used on the Wall. Once the Wall's 5 segments are all built, you may build two Towers (2 red cards each) at its ends. Once both Towers are built, you may build the one Keep (3 red cards) behind the Wall.

Any built structure can be fortified by stacking more red cards on top: +1 for the Wall, +2 for a Tower, +3 for the Keep. Your Ruler can also be fortified with matching-rank cards. Fortification layers must be defeated top-first. Once a structure has been armed with a weapon, it can no longer be fortified — arming is always the last thing you can add to a structure.

Arming Weapons

Black cards arm a completed structure with a weapon — once armed, nothing more can be added or removed from that structure.

Attacking

Pick one of your armed weapons and a target structure on the enemy board. Roll dice (1 for a Ram, 2 for a Ballista, 3 for a Catapult) and total them. Each weapon also has its own trick, so the choice of which structure to arm is a real tradeoff between cost, reliability, and raw power, not just "bigger is always better":

• Battering Ram — adds +1 to its attack total
• Ballista — rerolls any die that comes up a 1
• Catapult — no trick, relies on nothing but its 3 dice

The target number is the value of whatever is physically on top of that structure: if it hasn't been armed yet, that's its topmost red layer (a single card for a Wall segment, the combined value of both cards for a Tower, or all three for the Keep); once it's been armed, the weapon's own black card(s) sit on top instead and set the target number. Number cards count face value, Aces count 1, face cards count 6. Beat the number and you capture that top layer (and the weapon along with it) into your discard pile. You may also combine two of your weapons against one target (their dice and traits both apply) — but that uses both of your actions for the turn.

Once all enemy Wall segments, one Tower, and the entire Keep have been destroyed, their Ruler becomes attackable. A Ruler (and each fortifying card on it) counts as 10 points and must be defeated layer by layer, just like any other structure. Destroying the base Ruler card wins the game.

Glossary

• Ruler — the King/Queen card each side is defending
• Battering Ram — a Wall-mounted weapon (1 die, +1 to its attack total)
• Ballista — a Tower-mounted weapon (2 dice, rerolls any 1s)
• Catapult — a Keep-mounted weapon (3 dice, no special trick)
• Fortification — extra red cards stacked on a structure to make it harder to capture

This and other original games can be found in the book 52+ New Games for Those Old Cards by Kenneth P. Langer.