by Shei Santos

The Beginning

The idea of designing a two-player version of one of our games came about in the most informal way possible. During a conversation in 2024, our editor David Esbrí asked us, "Haven't you thought about designing a two-player version of The Red Cathedral or The White Castle?"

The truth is, you always think it would be nice to make some kind of spinoff of one of your games, but the publishing world is complex, and you need a strong title to be able to generate more material around it. In the end, the obvious choice was The White Castle Duel.

But even so, although we gladly agreed, we did so under the condition that we would present something to Devir only if we truly believed it was going to be good. Publishing games just for the sake of publishing has never been our priority, and if we were going to release a two-player version of The White Castle, it had to be worthwhile because that game is already good with two players.

But we had another, more important, little "problem"...

First-Time Parents, Experienced Designers

This time we faced a challenge we weren't prepared for. Fabio, our first child, was born during the summer of 2024, and with that our lives were turned upside down.

How do you design a board game, with all the time that takes, while simultaneously discovering what it means to be parents for the first time? How do you balance the most important task of your life — caring for a newborn — with the demanding focus required to work on a design?

The solution? Making use of any free moment. We had been tossing around ideas for what to do with this two-player version but hadn't written anything down yet. (Literally you have no time.) Over coffee during one of our walks with the baby, the light bulb went off and...we had nothing to write with! In the time it took to serve us that coffee, Isra ran to the shop across the street, bought the cheapest notebook and pens he could find, and we started discussing ideas and sketching the game.

The White Castle Duel was practically designed one-handed in cafés and bars
We used every free moment to brainstorm and develop ideas, playtested while taking care of the baby and while he slept. It was a real challenge we feel proud of because designing a game while living with sleep deprivation is no easy task.

Literally, any moment and any place
The Design

The White Castle is already a very good game for two players. We couldn't just make a reduced version of The White Castle, but "now for two". After all, Carcassonne für 2 had been a big disappointment for us as it was basically just that: Carcassonne with fewer tiles and only two player colors.

So we went drastic. There would be no dice in this design — but bridges had to remain, right? They're the soul of the game! One of the ideas discarded during the development of The White Castle was to have a bridge with colored meeples that would be taken from the ends. By removing the dice but keeping the bridges, we could keep the spirit of the game but with a radical change.


We kept working to create more differences. There would be two bridges, a cloth bag with cylinders in the three colors of the original game, and a "castle" board composed of tiles forming a pyramid (similar to one of the original discarded ideas for The White Castle). In each "room" cylinders would be placed, offering the possibility of performing an action or buying a card.

One of the first versions of The White Castle
The personal board would have three lamps, one for each color (instead of just one), and you could obtain cards to add to them depending on the cylinder you took.

We would use only one meeple of each type (courtiers, warriors, gardeners), advancing them along specific tracks so the game wouldn't be about removing meeples from your board as in the original.

The first (and the ugliest) version
With these ideas in place, we made a blank prototype and tested a little, filling the blanks on the go. (As I said, we had no free time.)

And well...it was a huge failure. Some good ideas, but it lacked so much. We weren't sure we'd even have anything to show the publisher, so we changed everything we didn't like, reshaped the board to resemble the original (some concessions had to be made), and refined the actions and cards. Keeping the bridges, in this version you played three rounds (as in the original) in which the bridges were refilled from the cloth bag and the well card changed, marking the remaining rounds.

It was taking shape at a slow but steady pace

More defined, but still waaaaaaay to go
We ran some playtests with our group with this version, and it didn't work at the same level we wanted it to. You definitely could see that there was a game there, but it still had to be found.


So we had something to work on with the ideas sort of working, but one problem remained: refilling cylinders, placing them in order on the bridges, having them roll away if placed wrong... This added downtime and made the game last longer than the original game with two players, adding a maintenance phase that, honestly, was boring.

We kept testing variations, but always with the bridges, bag, and lots of wooden cylinders — until one day, over coffee (we promise we're not lying about this game being designed in cafés), we thought of the "outbound and return round".

If we carry a notebook and a pen...why not a cloth bag full of wooden cylinders?
Instead of having cylinders in a bag, filling bridges, placing them, removing them, and so on, they would already be on your personal board, ready to be used. Each player would take six turns to place cylinders on the central board, then six turns collecting them back, always triggering actions when placing or collecting.

It turned out that losing the bridges was exactly what the game needed to shine. With this simple change, we eliminated:

▪️ Around twenty minutes of set-up and upkeep.
▪️ Half the wooden cylinders.
▪️ The cloth bag.

Perfect! And to make the choices even more interesting, every time you placed a cylinder, you'd get a benefit based on what you covered (since in the original you gain or pay coins).

In the first iteration of this idea, the cylinders had simple rewards, and they were the main way to get lantern cards during the game
This worked wonderfully. We were nearly finished! All that was left was to figure out the values/rewards of the three tracks...or so we thought.


And we didn't know how wrong we were. The longer we played the game, the more we realized that we were not even close to the end.

The Clan Member Tracks

We like tracks, but not too much. If a game has a track that gives rewards or points, great. If 80% of the game is just moving along tracks...not so much.

And this first version had three tracks, one for each clan member. That's when we realized the gardener and warrior actions were much less fun than the courtier, which couldn't be the case. After a lot of thought, we found a middle ground: you'd place eight discs in gardens or training grounds, and these gardeners/warriors would score points based on the cards you had bought. The player decides whether to focus on more warriors or more gardeners.


We kept the courtier track — it made sense thematically as ascending in the castle, and it helped multiply flags — because we liked having at least one clan member echo the original game.

With this, we had the three types of clan members defined. The gardens worked a bit different in the beginning, but we found the balance between something new and something that can remember you from the original.

Glad that David Esbrí made us forget to use flat mini-meeples for the training grounds
The Trade Action

We had three clan members, but The White Castle: Matcha had already been released, so the prototype was asking for a fourth action. The obvious decision here was adding the geishas to the game.

We really tried to make something work with the geishas
But after running through ideas and discarding them, we saw that this addition would increase the complexity (and the components thanks to chasen markers and geisha meeples), so we decided on a "wild card" action to use excess resources. After watching Disney+'s Shōgun, we loved the idea of Portuguese trade so that became the fourth action.


The Cards

Finally, with the game about 90% complete, we tested with friends who had already played on Tabletop Simulator to check usability and physical play. We play a lot on TTS, but you always have to have up front in mind that the game will be played on an actual table.

The game went well, but our friend Ángel commented, "I feel like it's always the same, even though there are many changing parts."

The game that changed everything
And there's nothing worse than playing a board game two or three times and having seen everything — or thinking that there's no point in playing any other way.

Watching them play, we realized that was because only one type of card varied during the game. Flags always came from the same spot, helmets and swords from another, and what are now cranes from another — so we made a drastic decision: All cards in the game would differ, and they would trigger immediately upon purchase.


This led to an intense job of combining, cataloging, and balancing so that nothing was too strong or too weak. This was mentally exhausting, especially since we had considered the design almost finished, but something told us this final push was worth it.


Once all cards were handwritten on sticky notes, we tested again and...the game took on another dimension. Every turn mattered. Every turn was interesting. You had to anticipate which cylinder your opponent would play to activate the lamp you needed. That wonderful feeling from The White Castle — that every turn counts — was finally here.

Designed and played one-handed!
Once again, we must thank our playtesters, both physical and TTS, for their enthusiasm and time. It's so much easier to develop a design when you know the people you're testing with, their tastes, their reactions, and can make decisions based on that.


After many tests and adjustments — balancing the three scoring paths and costs, and ensuring every card was interesting — we were able to conclude the development.

We delivered on time so that Joan Guardiet could once again turn our ugly prototype into stunning illustrations, Meeple Foundry could shine once more with graphic design, and as always (spoiling us as usual) our editor David Esbrí could work his magic in shaping an incredible product. We couldn't ask for a better team. We are very lucky to have them.

We hope you have as much fun as we had (and are still having) playing this game.

Shei & Isra
August 2025

Image: Ilya Ushakov