Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In this series of reviews, I am working my way through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about 2025’s The Sandcastles of Burgundy, his 44th game. The Sandcastles of Burgundy (Sandcastles) stands out from all of Stefan Feld’s other designs in two notable ways. Firstly, this is Feld’s first foray into designing a children’s game. Secondly, this is Feld’s first co-design with his wife Susanne who, as an elementary school teacher, brings her professional experience with children to bear, working with Feld to simplify the game down into the experience it is today.

In Sandcastles, a foreign dignitary, Queen Crab, has announced her intention to come visit your kingdom. As a way to show her gratitude for you being such a gracious host, she has sent ahead some beach-themed decorations from her kingdom and has asked that you decorate your village in preparation for a beach party that she plans to throw when she arrives. Sandcastles…

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[caption id="attachment_328066" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] Good for home, as a filler, or for a game on the go.[/caption]

Cards and Points

If you have read my interview with Earl Patterson, you know how we met. Congress of Gamers has been a fount of good times, good games, and good connections for me ever since I moved to the DMV (the D.C., Maryland, Virginia area). Meeting Mr. Patterson was a joy. The first game we discussed was Make Your Words Count! and it takes very little time to discover that this is his baby.

The game is relatively simple. From a deck of letter cards, players are dealt 5 or 7 cards (decided at the start of the game). They also determine the score goal; recommended is 100 points, but players can decide on a shorter or much longer game if they wish. In the center of the table are Community Vowels, one each of “A”, “E”, ‘I”, “O”, and “U”—these are each worth 0 points and are usable by everyone every round to ensure that there is always something the player can do. Note that there are standard vowel cards in the main deck that are worth 1 point each.

On each player’s turn, they take the letter cards from…

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Even the big-brained fans of titles such as High Frontier 4 All need a break from time to time.

Pax Viking Junior, a family-weight version of the title’s big brother, Pax Viking, hit shelves in 2024. An exploration game for players ages 6 and up, Pax Viking Junior distills most of the gameplay in Pax Viking into a very straightforward affair and focuses on something kids love: cats!

Over a series of turns, players move their longship token to different regions in order to make friends with other farm animals and household pets (and yes, even the rules describe this process as “taking over friends”). These friends include mountain goats, fish, horses and cows, each represented on animal tiles that are placed into empty regions during a player’s turn.

If a region does not have an animal tile, the region’s first visitor gets to add one to the map, giving that player control of the region and the animal token there as a friend. Future visitors can take over the region using a cute takeover mechanic by adding more kitten tokens from the active player’s supply, or dropping one of a player’s two “Big Cat” tokens into the region, which scares the kitten tokens of all other…

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