The Palace of Mad King Ludwig

Number of players: 2–4 Players
Playing time: 75 Min
Complexity: 2.83 / 5
Age: 13+

About the game
King Ludwig II has summoned the kingdom’s finest architects to create his grandest achievement: an extravagant palace of elegant rooms, impressive staircases, sprawling hallways, and a surrounding moat filled with swans.

In The Palace of Mad King Ludwig, players work together to build one enormous shared palace, placing room tiles into a growing layout while still competing to prove they made the greatest contribution. Each completed room can provide rewards, such as swan tokens, Favor tiles, special abilities, or points. Players also track the room types they construct on personal Blueprint boards to unlock bonuses and score end-game objectives.

Swan tokens serve several roles: they are currency for acquiring rooms and abilities, can generate rewards during play, and score points at the end when collected in sets of different colors. As the palace expands, the moat gradually grows around its outer edges. Once the moat completely surrounds the palace—or certain room supplies run out—the game ends, and the architect with the highest score wins.

The Palace of Mad King Ludwig is a competitive tile-placement strategy game with shared construction, spatial puzzle-solving, set collection, resource management, private and public scoring goals, and an ever-tightening endgame created by the closing moat.