Wouter & Ymke 
Going to the beach and building a sandcastle is usually a fairly relaxed activity. In Sandcastles, apparently somebody decided we needed to turn that into a competition as well. The game has everyone building their own castle from square tiles, filling it with windows, starfish, shells, shovels and buckets, while birds circle somewhere above it all.
You have 15 rounds to put everything together, and while building the castle itself is straightforward, getting the tiles you actually want is another matter. Every round asks whether you’re happy with what’s currently available or willing to pass and see what appears afterwards. Sometimes that works out nicely. Sometimes you watch exactly the tile you needed disappear into somebody else’s castle. By the end, you’ll have a little structure in front of you and, hopefully, enough points to call it the best sandcastle at the beach.
👥 2-6 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 20 minutes
📝 Designers: Alex Cutler
🎨 Artwork: Gica Tam
🏢 Publisher: Pandasaurus Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Everyone starts with a starter tile, placed in the bottom centre of an imaginary five-by-five grid. This determines where your castle will be built, and it can never grow beyond five tiles wide or five tiles high. The game lasts 15 rounds, with everyone adding one tile to their castle during each round. After that, you score the different features you’ve collected and whoever has the most points wins.
At the beginning of a round, the active player takes a small face-down stack containing one tile for each player and reveals the first one. They can either take that tile or pass it to the player on their left. That player gets the same choice, and this continues until somebody takes it. If the tile reaches the final player who can still choose, they have to keep it. Only then is the next tile revealed. Once you’ve taken a tile, you’re done drafting for that round, so any remaining tiles simply skip you. When everyone has chosen one, the round ends and the player to the left becomes the new active player.
After choosing a tile, you immediately add it to your castle. Most are sand tiles, which can be placed anywhere along the bottom row or directly above another sand tile, including your starter tile. Everything has to remain within that five-by-five grid, and once you’ve put one somewhere, you can’t move it later. So yes, that slightly awkward placement you made five rounds ago is now officially part of the architecture.
Sky tiles follow different placement rules. These always go into the top row of your grid, even if there’s nothing underneath them yet. At the end of the game, each one drops down until it reaches the highest sand tile in its column. You can have up to five sky tiles. If you take a sixth, you can replace one you’ve already placed or discard the new one.
Most of the scoring comes from the different things shown on your tiles. Birds appear on sky tiles and score according to the total number you’ve collected. Windows score separately in rows, with higher numbers of windows reaching higher scoring thresholds. Each tile actually contains two window rows, so there can be ten separate rows to check in a completed castle. Starfish work differently again. Every orthogonally connected pair of matching colours scores 3 points, and the same starfish can be part of more than one pair. Having at least one starfish in each of the five colours also gives you a 5-point bonus.
Finally, shells are worth 1 point each, shovels 2 and buckets 3, regardless of where they’re placed. Whoever has the most shells, shovels or buckets also receives a small bonus for that category. Having five sky tiles is worth another 5 points. Once everything has been counted, the player with the highest total wins and receives the rather important title of “Best Sandcastle at the Beach”.
Artwork & Components
There’s not a huge amount inside the box. Sandcastles comes with 90 regular tiles, six starter tiles and a scorepad, and that’s basically what the game needs. The tiles are the main attraction anyway, since you’re spending the entire game arranging them into your own little patch of beach.
Visually, everything is bright and playful. Most of the castle consists of warm yellows and oranges, while the sky tiles add plenty of blue along the top. The starfish, shells, buckets and shovels are much more colourful, which also makes them easy to spot when you’re looking around the table. I especially like the birds on the sky tiles and the different sections of castle walls. They’re small details, but they stop the finished castle from becoming one large collection of yellow squares.
What caught our attention most was simply seeing those castles develop. At the beginning, everyone has the same little entrance sitting on the table. Fifteen rounds later, there are several completely different structures in front of you. The illustrations connect well enough that they read as complete castles rather than grids of unrelated tiles, even when your actual construction decisions have been somewhat questionable. Some of ours looked like we’d changed our building plans halfway through.
The artwork is simple rather than detailed, which makes sense once several castles are on the table. The scoring symbols remain easy to see, and there isn’t much component management getting in the way. Mix the tiles, prepare the required stacks and start building. The finished castles are really what you’re left looking at, and I like that everyone ends up with something recognisably their own using little more than a pile of square tiles.
Our Experience
During our first game, we were far too casual about passing tiles. If something wasn’t immediately useful, we’d send it onwards and assume another good option would appear. That worked for a while, which probably made us a little too confident. Then our castles started filling up and we discovered that wanting “a starfish” and wanting “this particular colour of starfish in this particular place” are very different situations. A tile we would have passed without much thought during the first few rounds could suddenly become exactly what we needed later. After a couple of games, we weren’t really asking whether a tile was good anymore. We were asking whether it was good enough for the castle in front of us right now.
We also became much more aware of the difference between having potential points and actually scoring them. Our early castles tended to contain lots of promising little projects. We’d start a group of matching starfish, get close to another window threshold and collect a few birds because surely more would appear later. Then we’d realise there were only four rounds remaining and half of those plans still needed another tile or two. In later games, we became better at recognising when to stop creating new possibilities and concentrate on finishing what we’d already started. I found myself becoming quite happy with a boring-looking tile if it completed something useful.
We also became much more aware of the moment when we’d pushed our luck too far. More than once, somebody passed a perfectly usable tile, watched the next useful one disappear to another player and immediately looked back at what they’d just given away. Nobody needed to say much at that point. The regret was usually visible enough. Of course, occasionally waiting worked perfectly and produced exactly what we needed, which was probably why we kept doing it. One successful gamble is apparently enough to erase the previous three failures from memory.
The other castles gradually became more relevant as well. We weren’t studying every tile like it was a chess position, but before passing something we’d regularly check what the next player was collecting. A tile that did very little for us might connect two of their starfish or add exactly the feature they’d been chasing. That led to the occasional “You’re not seriously giving them that?” around the table. There is room to keep something partly because another player wants it, but that comes with a very practical problem: you still have to put the unwanted thing in your own castle. We therefore didn’t find ourselves blocking each other constantly. Mostly, the other castles became another piece of information to consider before deciding what to pass.
By then, we were looking at much more than just the tile in front of us. We could see what we’d already committed to, what the others needed, how much room remained in our castle and how many rounds were left for an unfinished idea to pay off. What we couldn’t see was the rest of the little stack waiting to be revealed. That gave us perfectly reasonable arguments both for keeping a tile and for passing it, and naturally also gave us plenty of opportunities to explain afterwards why somebody else had obviously made the wrong choice. More importantly, what we wanted changed as our castles developed, so those 15 drafts didn’t feel like repetitions of the same decision.
Our Thoughts
Sandcastles is still very much a light game for us. You can’t really decide on a complete strategy at the beginning because you have no control over which tiles will appear or whether they’ll reach you. Instead, the starfish, windows and other features you’ve already placed gradually determine which later tiles are worth waiting for. If one scoring idea starts developing well, you can pursue it, but sometimes the tiles simply refuse to cooperate and you need to move on. Players who like building towards a carefully planned result may find that frustrating. Here, accepting that you won’t get everything you want is part of playing the game.
The number of scoring methods is important because players don’t automatically value the same things. One person might be interested in a particular starfish while somebody else needs windows or is suddenly much more invested in collecting buckets than any reasonable beachgoer should be. That matters because otherwise we’d all be looking for roughly the same tiles. Instead, something I don’t care about might be exactly what the player next to me needs. That’s also why looking around the table matters. You don’t need to calculate somebody else’s entire score to recognise that you’re about to hand them exactly what they want.
Those different scoring methods also lead directly to our biggest criticism: scoring the finished castle is more fiddly than actually building it. Windows are the main culprit. Each tile contains two separate rows of windows, so a five-tile-high castle can leave you checking ten rows against the scoring table. Then you still have starfish connections, birds, shells, shovels, buckets, collection bonuses and the sky-tile bonus to count. None of these is difficult by itself, and after a few games you know what you’re looking for, but the final count feels surprisingly involved after such an accessible game. I would’ve preferred the scoring to be a little closer in simplicity to everything that comes before it.
I also don’t think Sandcastles is a game where repeated plays are going to uncover completely different ways of approaching it. We certainly got better at judging when a scoring idea was becoming unrealistic and at recognising which tiles were actually worth waiting for, but there’s a limit to how far that develops. Whether you keep returning to it will probably depend more on whether you continue to enjoy not knowing what will appear next and seeing a different castle emerge from those tiles. For us, that’s enough here. We don’t need to discover a completely new approach every time if making those choices and watching the resulting castle take shape remains enjoyable.
I can especially see Sandcastles working around a family table, because choosing a tile and adding it to your castle is much easier to understand than squeezing every possible point out of it. Younger players can enjoy collecting colourful things and watching their castle grow, while adults can pay more attention to scoring thresholds, placement and what other players are collecting. Younger children may need some help when everything has to be scored at the end, though. On the other side, anyone who strongly dislikes randomness in drafting games, or wants to plan several turns ahead with a reasonable expectation that those plans will work, probably isn’t going to find what they’re looking for here.
For us, the fun remained in building the castle and seeing how our priorities changed as the empty spaces disappeared. The final scoring could be smoother, and I don’t expect our twentieth game to reveal some completely different side of Sandcastles, but neither of those things stopped us enjoying our time with it. I like that the castle you’re building gives you increasingly specific things to look for, while the draft never guarantees that you’ll actually get them. Add in the occasional questionable placement, somebody regretting a pass almost immediately and a table full of different castles at the end, and we had a good time with it. I’d happily go back to the beach for another one.
📝 We received a copy of Sandcastles from Pandasaurus Games.
