Mad King Ludwig board game sequel trades tiles for blueprint drafting paper

A follow-up to Castles of Mad King Ludwig is in the works that uses vellum and drafting pencils instead of tiles to construct the eponymous monarch’s inscrutable home demands.

Announced January 9th by publisher Bezier Games as Blueprints of Mad King Ludwig, the upcoming board game will retain the core interactions of its predecessor while folding a few new wrinkles into the mix. The most prominent of these is trading the tile-placement mechanic for sketching room designs onto vellum paper by sliding cards underneath the sheets.

As showcased in the announcement trailer, each player will have their own blueprint on which they’ll attempt to appease the constantly shifting whims of King Ludwig. Coloured pencils and the so-thin-its-translucent play sheets make this interaction look fairly satisfying, and the result is a jumbled mess of colours and room shapes from which a final score will be tallied at the end of the game.

As players complete room, they will unlock bonuses such as secret doors and passages, hidden objective cards for more end-game scoring opportunities, additional drafting space on their gridded sheet and moats - what the last of these accomplish is not yet clear. Players will compete for scoring objectives called the King’s Favour, which comprise general play behaviour such as constructing the largest courtyard - open spaces within a connected ring of rooms.

Once your playgroup masters King Ludwig’s newest round of architectural demands, you can toss in Royal Decree cards that expand and augment both the way sessions play out and how you score them at the end. The one shown in the announcement video allows a player to unlock more drafting space when they complete certain objectives, so expect other Royal Decrees to add similar conditional player abilities.

Ted Alspach, the designer of Castles of Mad King Ludwig and CEO of publisher Bézier Games, will be leading design on this project, as well. Bézier is best known for the broadly popular Ultimate Werewolf series of social deduction games (the beast is even featured in the company’s logo) and the 1012 city-building game, Suburbia.

Blueprints of Mad King Ludwig will crowdfund via Kickstarter beginning February 7th, but a proceeding retail date is not yet known. The box will contain the pad of vellum draft sheets, a set of eight coloured pencils, a sharper and an eraser, along with all the cards and other bits needed to play.