Castle Tricon, the virtual fair organized by CGE, HeidelBÄR e Horrible Guild, reopened its doors on 26 and 27 February 2021 for a special spring edition. Obviously we took the opportunity to visit the exhibitors' stands and discover the new offers. The first thing we came across was the new version of the client: Castle Tricon in fact it can be visited for free (upon registration) with the software for Windows o Poppy made available on the event website. We are pleased to note that various bugs have been fixed with the new version (in our case, we no longer encountered the random disconnections we ran into in the last edition) and new avatars were added for visitors.
Walking (and fluttering) around the world of Castle Tricon, we got to participate in the mini-games introduced in this one Spring edition: a treasure hunt, a quiz (with games, jerseys and codes up for grabs for the digital editions of the boardgames), a track for speed races and more hidden avatars to find and unlock. In the stands of CGE e Horrible Guild it is again possible to try (complete with a demonstrator to explain the rules) the titles of the past edition, including Lost Ruins of Arnak (which we told you about in this article), Under Falling Skies, Letter jam, Unicorn fever, Vampire: The Masquerade - Revenge , King's Dilemma e Codenames. The three “worlds” of the exhibitors were then enriched with details, nice easter eggs to discover and additional game tables.
The HeidelBÄR Games booth and the Blaze test
The world set up by HeidelBÄR GAMES for this edition it has shown itself in dazzling form: an underground dungeon full of details, with a few game tables manned by demonstrators and various portals that lead to the sections of the fair dedicated to individual titles (where additional tables have been made available). After a few minutes of waiting, we are able to try Blaze, one of the novelties of the German publisher in 2021.
Blaze is a card based game Durak, a traditional title dating back to 18th century imperial Russia, still very popular in Russia and Eastern European countries. To keep the link to tradition firm, the entire artistic side of the title has been entrusted to Nadezhda Mikryukova, which has created splendid illustrations of birds following the Russian folk tradition. The demonstrator also explained to us that a special metallic print was used for the box and the back of the cards, of which it is unfortunately not possible to appreciate the details without seeing them live.
In a match of Blaze, 3 to 5 players will try to get points by getting rid of all the cards in their hand first, but also by betting on opponents who will run out of cards before others. The game cards are used to attack the opponent on our left, possibly also gaining the support of the next player. The opponent under attack can only defend himself with cards of the color of those already played, the cards that can be used in attack are instead those that show the same value as the first card played, or the value of one of the cards in defense.
This particular attack and defense mechanics manages to make the 2 against 1 combat very tense and well balanced, the decisions to be made are always painful and in the balance between wanting to discard as many cards as possible and keep the best ones in hand (possibly having the same value) in order to launch a more consistent and difficult to contain attack. The attention to the table, meanwhile, is kept alive by the succession of variable alliances that are formed.
We will then be encouraged to follow the clashes in which we do not participate to see who will take the “trump” cards in hand, ie those that win against all the other colors, both in attack and in defense, with a particularly intriguing general structure. Definitely, Blaze in short, he managed to convince us: despite its nature as a classic card title, the game was in fact thrilling and full of twists. We can only thank HeidelBÄR for letting us discover this truly remarkable title, and for making it available in a sumptuous edition to say the least.
