Stronghold is one of the best games that I have a real hard time recommending. But I will still recommend it, albeit with a handful of caveats.

Frist of all, the good stuff. David and I were looking for some meatier games to play, just the two of us. We grabbed War of the Ring, Eclipse, 7th Continent and Stronghold. We had both played Stronghold before, so we started with that. This time around, I played the defenders, and David the invaders.

It started out quiet. My guys were busy prepping the cauldrons of hot something or other, building canons and training men, while David’s beasts barely broke the tree line while they were prepping catapults, ballistae, bridges and who knows what else (cut to ominous tree felling sounds and metal being hammered just out of eye sight). A few orcs and goblins made their way up the paths and my archers made quick work of them.

Then they started marching, dozens at a time, protected from my arrows by mantelets. It got overwhelming. Before I knew it, I had goblins and orcs right at my walls, and holy shit was that a troll?!

An unearthly glare (I’m assuming from some giant mirror being carried by a poor page boy) kept the hordes at bay for a few advances. My cauldrons took out a bunch of goblins and I had a sharp shooter who tried to prevent those damn trolls from coming up the path.

Two sections of my castle wall got blown up by orc suicide bombers and another two parts of the wall ended up having my entire crew killed, but their deaths were not in vain. They managed to hold them off just long enough to get reinforcements situated. But it wasn’t easy because the beasts apparently knew magic and cast a curse causing gale winds slowing down my men.

Thank goodness the orcs seemed to have really bad eyesight and their catapults missed more than they hit and we survived through the night, protecting the castle.

I have yet to have an experience like I have had with Stronghold. It’s so fun and thematic that two minutes in you forget that the invader’s army are just tiny cubes pulled from a bag. There are so many choices to make and the asymmetry is wonderful.

But let me tell you, there’s a tall barrier to entry with this puppy. First of all, the rulebook is poo. What is it with game companies using bigger pages to get fewer into a rule book? Big blocks of text are nearly impossible to find exactly what you need. The rule might be on this page, but you have to read the entire thing to find it again. It would be much more user friendly to divide a rule book up into sections with more smaller pages. It’s a pain in the ass to have to keep thumbing through a rule book that is so big and thin that it flops over right when you find where you need to read.

And the rules should not be so confusing that in addition to flipping through the book, you are constantly checking BGG or a learn to play by Rodney. I’ll include the How to Play video below, because it helped a lot!

Also, if you have a ton of rules, which I have found tend to accompany very thematic games, have some sort of player guide. We used a fan made player aide that still had tiny type font and a TON of information. There were a lot of places on the board that would have benefitted from some text or iconography. And the defender action tiles say things like “Poles – Place a Poles token on a Tower,” as opposed to “Draw hit card to attack 1 wall section adjacent to tower (weakest unit only).” Just that little bit of info would have saved us so much time scouring through the rulebook.

So, if you are a solid gamer, looking for something you can sink your orc-like teeth into and you don’t mind printing out some player aides, some tile overlays or using an awesome searchable rules Word document, I would strongly recommend this game.