Endless corridors

This year on my annual trek to Thunder Bay I got in a couple games of Castles of Mad King Ludwig and they had one odd thing in common with one another - in both games the bonus point favour pucks had the bonus for number of corridors and also square footage of corridors.  When you have both of these in play it warps the game quite substantially as everyone rushes to build hallways instead of ignoring them as is usual.  Also the 350 corridor rooms which are normally the worst cards in the deck end up being quite powerful and often sat in the 15,000 spot because people were terrified of others getting all that corridor space.

My feeling is that when the corridor favours are both out the game really favours experienced players.  Most of the favours aren't that difficult to sort out - if purple rooms are the bonus, then you think of each purple room as being worth +2 points.  Not exactly complicated, and at the end of the game you can math out their exact values to you fairly easily.  Corridor rooms cause a lot more consternation though because you have to figure out how to sequence your plays to get lots of them at just the right time.

In the second game my second last turn was simply playing the second last Stairs.  Not what you want to do with your second last turn most of the time!  However, my last turn was playing a basement room to finish those stairs, getting a bonus stairs up out of the basement room, using that basement room completion to take another turn, building a yellow room on the end of the stairs going up, using my free bonus hallway (emptying the hallways) to finish the yellow room, getting another turn, and using that final turn to by the 350 corridor to snatch both most corridors and most square footage of corridors.  Five tiles laid in a single turn was enough to absolutely blow out the game in my favour.

Setting that up and realizing that you will get to do it is not something a starting player is going to do, even if they are good at games in general.  It takes time to get used to how best to use extra turns and extra Hallways/Stairs and if you have that all sorted you can do some nutty things.  Beginners at the table found themselves cut out of Stairs and Hallways unexpectedly and that can be really key if you have been building your game around getting a specific amount of those things on the board.

This has made me like Castles even more than before.  The changing favours really keep you thinking and make new playthroughs different.  You can't just develop a simple metric for how good each room is so you have to recalculate everything each time through.  While eventually you would get used to the favours that come out something is always going to be a bit different in the game to keep it fresh and new.

Note to self:  In a game with all the Corridor favours out, Hall of Mirrors is *really* good, even if you get it halfway through.