Coral Castle Review: Golden Coral
Transcript
Hey everybody, I'm Tom Vasel and today we're taking a look at Coral Castle. Now this makes me think of the Coral Castle which was when I lived in Homestead was a main feature there where a man built his wife a castle out of coral. That's not what this is. This is creating a magical mermaid garden through the idea of drafting cards. Drafting cards is a really fun mechanism that isn't used as much in games as it should be and this game is pretty much all about that. Let's take a look. In this game players going to be playing through three rounds and have a large deck of cards. This card is made up of various letter sets that you'll pick based on the number of players. And in each round you'll be drafting cards. So in round one you get nine cards. You look at these cards, you'll decide one that you'll get to keep, you'll pass the next of the cards you receive, keep one and keep going. Once you have everyone has drafted all the cards, you'll then look at the pearls at the top of cards. So this has one, two, three, four. So I would get four more pearls. Here's a one that's worth three and another one plus my starting five and that's how many pearls I have. I then will play a certain number of cards, six, seven or eight depending on the number of rounds. So I'll pick the cards that I play and then we'll resolve them.
Now when you resolve many of these cards have symbols on this. This has two mermaids, this has a tentacle, this one has a mermaid and a pitchfork. You'll be moving on those tracks. So let's say I move four on the tentacle track. As the yellow player I go one, two, three, four. Since I passed this double, that moves me two on the mermaid track. And then I'll say I move six on the mermaid track. One, two, three, four, five, six. That's going to move me four on this track. Which is one, two, three, four. Hey, I get two more pearls. Now pearls are needed because a lot of the cards cost pearls. This one you can see is very expensive but doubles all the mermaids that I play. Some cards have other requirements. Some will let you play an extra card like this one here. When you get to the end of the track that's basically 10, you'll come back to the beginning and you'll put one of your little seaweed pieces there. They stick in the holes in the boards here and that's just basically to show you that your 10 plus the number you have there.
This matters because at the end of the game whoever's the farthest on each of these tracks is going to score points. You can see here that being first in the bottom track is 10, then seven, then four. 12, eight, four. Nine, six, three. After everyone is done playing their cards, you can keep cards. So for example in round one I'll keep four cards. So I might say I'm going to keep these four. Now you can only keep you can keep cards that you played or didn't play. It's up to you. Although each gold card if you play it you can't keep it again. But you'll keep these and then next round I'll draw nine. Well these four have already been kept for example. You'll draw nine and you'll draft another nine cards. So I'll have 13 cards and I'll be playing seven of them. And then I'm going to keep five of those cards. So five plus then the nine will be 14 and I'll play eight of those cards.
At the end of the game many of the cards that you will have played over the course of the game will give you points. Anything that shows a starfish will move you on the point track. But you're also going to get points for having the most in each of these sections. At the top of the board. So whoever has the most points when we add up these points plus the points you've gotten moving on the star track, whoever has the most is the winner.
I like Coral Castle but I do want to mention a few issues. The plastic mermaid shells and the pearls, that's a cute idea. The plastic mermaid shells do feel like a kid's jewelry kit. I I don't know. They just don't I wish they looked a little nicer than they do. And the artwork on the cards is fine. But gameplay itself is really interesting. This game does something I haven't seen before and that's where you draft a handful of cards. You can get money off all the cards. That card that showed two pearls that gives you money, that's all it does but I might draft it for that reason. Because you're going to run out of pearls and you're going to want to play cards from your hand. Um in fact you could get a situation where you have you drafted a bunch of cards that cost pearls and you don't have enough to pay for them. You may not even be able to play some cards. So I like that concept.
I also like the concept that you can keep some cards. I have a good card. I'm going to play this card again and again. Now the great cards aren't going to let you do that but the good ones I could play it all three rounds. The game is not overly long. You're drafting, passing things around, drafting, passing them around. Each of the sets of cards has a slight different thing to it but moving on those tracks. I'm a fan of moving on tracks. You move on a track that lets you move on a space on the next track. So all of this makes for a kind of a fun interesting style game. There's a few things I wish could be better. I kind of wish there was a deck of the deck of cards sometimes you might be like I'm going to go for most mermaids and then you don't draw many of them. I mean you could draft them as they come around but I would I would have preferred maybe there was a new set of cards that came out only in round three so that the cards kind of ramped up because it's possible for the second the middle part of the game to be the most impactful for you based on how the drafting went. But this is all minor stuff. I think this is a very easy game to teach people.
It's going to be fun moving down the tracks and then putting the coral there showing that you've done that. Having those majorities is good but you can also score a lot of points during the game with cards. And so that balances out pretty well. It plays to five. I've not played it with five players yet but I played with the other remaining counts other than solo and I think it works pretty well. So this is definitely one to check out. I'd give it a 7.5 out of 10. It the artwork on the cover is very pretty. Um the game like I said looks a little childish but I think it's an actually fun family style game that's worth trying. So that's Coral Castle. I'm Tom Vasel. I like drafting and this game certainly has it. We'll see you next time.
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