Review The Castles of Tuscany

 On your turn in The Castles of Tuscany, you lay out region cards, disrupt and lay out region token tiles, or spend cards to place region tokens on your personal board. For this, you get an immediate bonus based on the color of that token and a point if you finish filling an area of that color. Cards and tiles have eight suits, and to place a tile you need to spend two cards of the same suit, with two cards of any suit acting as jokers. So to place a blue tile, you need to spend two blue cards, a blue card and a matching pair of cards - or any two matching pairs of cards.

 The eight available region tiles are randomly selected and replaced randomly from the player's personal tile supply. You may or may not flip the color your opponent wants! When someone has placed a third of their tiles, players score points by adding all of their current green points to the secondary red track.

 This step will happen again when someone places the second third of their tiles again, and again when someone places all of their tiles. This means that the points you score in the first third of the game will be added to your total points three times, so don't be lazy.

 You start the game with one of five bonus actions, and each time you place a red city tile on your regional board, you change your bonus action to another. These tiles allow you to use more cards, have more tile rooms in reserve, or modify certain color bonuses. These tiles give you ways to customize (customize) your building capabilities.

 Your starting layout affects your possible further growth and bonuses, although at the same time you are dependent on the randomness of cards and tile flips and, of course, not the random actions of your opponent. In this game, you will not be able to win with any special plan, because the tiles you need may not drop or, worse, the opponents may take them from you, forcing you to choose a different path to victory.

 Players also compete for color bonuses, being rewarded if all color areas on the board are covered. These bonuses are given to the first and second players. But the trick is that there won't be enough tiles for everyone to cover every color, so you'll have to keep track of who takes what. Your starting layout also affects this matchup, and if possible you can finish one color and then the other, getting a double color bonus for doing so.

 In five of our games, the player who was ahead in the first third of the game remained the winner until the end of the game, but in our sixth game, this no longer happened. And I think it's because we've gotten better at both building our own game engines and understanding who wants what and thus keeping someone from scoring and complicating those early points.