For a game that’s as simple and straightforward as Mad King Ludwig, I really appreciate the strategy to luck ratio. To put it concisely,There is a very small amount of luck in this game, but a large variety of strategic choices to be made.

The two biggest strategic areas are your decisions as the Master Builder, and deciding which rooms to buy/place. So…the whole game, I guess. Let’s start with the Master Builder.

Strategy as the Master Builder

As the Master Builder, you have tough choices to make because you get to define the prices of every room for the round, but you also get last choice in picking. This means that you have several factors to consider when you arrange those rooms:

How can I prevent my opponents from getting the rooms they need the most?

One key part to being Master Builder is being able to effectively block your opponents from getting the rooms they need. Is someone in desperate need of a yellow room that will finish off their giant living room and score them a bajillion points? Whoops, guess it costs 15,000 and they can’t afford it! If you want to win, analyzing the needs of your opponents and pricing accordingly is essential.

Where can I place the room I want to where it’s the right price for me, but to where the other players won’t buy it first?

Even though you’re the Master Builder, YOU still need to buy a room, and you get the chance to put it right where you want it…as long as your opponents don’t grab it first. If there’s a reasonably good room that you want, sure, you could price it at 2000 and it’d be dirt cheap for you, but what are the odds of somebody swiping it for that price before you can? Probably pretty high. You need to make sure your coveted rooms are expensive enough to repel your opponents, but cheap enough to where it doesn’t break your bank.

How can I get the most money?

Another thing to consider is placing the rooms in such a way to where your opponents won’t be total cheapskates. The money you get as Master Builder has to carry you all the way through the next few rounds, so you need to ensure you’re paid well. That means you have to look at how much money people have, what they want, and what they’re likely to buy. A player has the option of passing and receiving 5000 if they don’t want to buy anything. If someone is low on money and you put all the good tiles out of their range, you’re more likely to get nothing at all than something cheap. On the other hand, a rich player might be willing to pay through the nose to get a room they want. Sometimes it’s worth putting one of their coveted rooms just high enough to be expensive, but right at the range where they’re willing to shell out for it. You don’t ALWAYS want to block people’s coveted rooms, because sometimes you can make a small fortune by pricing them right.

These factors, combined together, create a compelling challenge as the Master Builder, and a fun exercise in reading your opponents. Players who routinely lose this game generally don’t know how to play the master builder well; it’s incredibly important to having a good game.

Strategy of buying/placing rooms

Of course, there’s also the rest of the game, buying and placing your rooms. You have to make careful choices here, because you constantly have to look at what you can afford, what you need, and how you can combine rooms together to not only create good bonuses, but also to make a castle that’s laid out well which keeps your options open.

Your orange cards play a big role in this. If you play according to those, you can make bank. If you get rewarded for every yellow room, buy yellow rooms and prevent other people from getting them. You always have to consider your end-game bonuses.

Spending money is also a pretty strategic affair. Your money has to carry you through multiple rounds until you can become Master Builder again, so you need to know when to splurge, and when to scrimp. If there’s a room that’s absolutely essential to your castle but it costs 15000 and you’re not Master Builder for three rounds, it might not be worth bankrupting yourself for the next several turns, especially since there’s no guarantee that you’ll even get a good payoff when you’re Master Builder.

Furthermore, spending “medium” amounts of money on rooms you don’t need isn’t the best idea either. You need to look at each room and decide its worth; if there are no rooms that are that good, it might just be worth buying the dirt-cheap ones to be able to afford the rooms you actually need when they come out. If the rooms in the middle are only marginally better than the ones at the bottom, maybe you’ll want to spend less money.

And of course, you also have to consider the turn order. Maybe the room you really want is high priced this round, and you suspect that the next Master Builder will make it cheaper. Maybe there’s a room that both you and your opponent REALLY want, but you know that your opponent is Master Builder next time so you’ll be able to buy it first. There are a lot of choices to be made, so choose wisely!

Finally, placing rooms and taking advantage of completion bonuses is huge. Sure, maybe you really need that purple room, but wait, what if you have enough to buy a cheap room, finish off a yellow room, and then use the yellow’s free turn to buy the one you needed? Perhaps you really want 250 square foot rooms because your orange card rewards you for them. Finish off a blue room, and then use its bonus put two 250 rooms on the stack so they come out next turn! Got a purple room that’s worth a lot of points? Better to connect complimentary rooms to every entrance to take max advantage of its bonus, which re-scores the whole tile!

So there you have it. I could go on, but it suffices to say that, if you’re looking for a nice light game that still has a multitude of compelling choices to make, Mad King Ludwig handily fills that niche.

What about the luck?

Ah, but yes, the luck. Luck isn’t always a bad thing, depending on the game, but sometimes an unhealthy dosage of it can ruin an otherwise excellent experience. I’m happy to say that Mad King Ludwig has a very small, trace amount of luck, but it’s not so insignificant that it’s not worth mentioning.

It’s those orange cards, man.

So, the orange cards give each player some kind of bonus they can work towards throughout the game. An orange card that gives extra points for yellow rooms incentivizes a player to purchase yellow rooms, and so on. Overall, I enjoy the mechanic because it gives players an overarching long-term strategy to work on, but it’s not without its issues.

The issue with the orange cards is that they’re not all created equal.

Let me explain. Some orange cards are just better than others. One orange card, for examples, gives 2 points for every purple room you play. Purple rooms are generally reasonably abundant. A clever player can extract ten to twenty points if they play to that card hard enough. Compare that with the orange card that gives you ONE point for every TWO completed rooms, and the difference is staggering. Rooms aren’t easy to complete; you have to cover every entrance with adjacent rooms. The fact that you can’t rapidly complete rooms all the time is the reason why you get special bonuses for doing so. I’ve never seen the latter card get more than four or five points in a game, a paltry amount compared to the 16 you might get from that purple bonus. Now, consider the prospect of getting two “dud” cards, while your opponent draws two which are easy to exploit. Your opponent immediately has an advantage over you in this case.

Usually, the cards are balanced well enough to where this isn’t an issue. But I have seen it happen, and more than once. It’s a shame that some orange cards are just flat-out better than others.

And then there’s the issue of the room stacks. The list of available rooms for every game is determined by shuffling the “room stack.” To replenish rooms, the Master Builder draws from this stack, and it indicates what rooms are to be drawn to fill in the empty gaps for that round.

The thing is, this deck never includes all the rooms, so there’s a portion of rooms that will never come out. Okay, so, imagine you’ve got an orange card that rewards you for playing small circle rooms. You might not get a fortune from it, but you figure you’ll at least get something. If you’re unlucky, you might find that the majority of the small circle cards were returned to the box in the initial shuffle, meaning they will never show up in the game. Sometimes you get screwed over when certain rooms just don’t show up because they were shuffled out of the game before it even started. That’s always a bummer.

Finally, the orange cards are kept secret for the duration of the game, which is something I like and don’t like at the same time. I like that it gives you this secret prerogative, a goal that you can pursue the whole game, unbeknownst to other players. I don’t like that it makes you unable to know if your opponent is going to turn their cards over in the end and reveal that they got 30 extra points from their orange cards because nobody could anticipate what kind of bonuses they might be holding. I feel like the Master Builder mechanic might be more meaningful if you could know what orange bonuses your opponents are sporting. This isn’t as big of a deal as the other points, but it does kind of suck if you can’t catch on to it and you find out at the very end that you could have stopped them if you were more informed. But then again, it also adds some fun suspense to the game, so it goes both ways.

At the end of the day, I’m okay with the orange cards, and the amount of strategy generally eclipses the amount of luck in this game, but it’s worth acknowledging that some players can get luckier than others.