As I thought there would only be three of us tonight and I hadn’t played this for a long while, I brought along Carolus Magnus. I think this might be my favourite 3 player game – it’s certainly well up there. Players fight for control of 15 different areas by placing cubes into the areas and their influence banks. By holding the most influence over a particular colour, you control all the cubes of that colour in an area. If you then control most cubes in an area when the King visits that area, you are rewarded by being allowed to build one of your castles in that area. If you have castles in adjacent areas, the areas merge to form one larger area with two castles in. First player to build all of their 8 castles wins.

There is a lot to watch, and I like the way everything is out in the open, so you don’t have to resort to memory. Keeping control of the colours important in the areas you control is important and you need to watch both your own and your opponents’ influence bank and cube reserve closely. However, it is often not possible to protect everything so you need to weigh up what you are willng to sacrifice. I concentrated on mainly two colours and was able to keep pretty tight control over them, despite only rolling one crown on the dice during the whole game. The two Marks were having a good battle over the red cubes and this helped me as they were less able to struggle in my colours. Eventually, I managed to engineer a situation where I was last to play in one round and could guarantee first in the next round, allowing me to place my seventh and eighth castles and claim the victory.