Designed by Alex Cutler (Critter Kitchen, A Place for All My Books) and published by Pandasaurus Games, Sandcastles is a drafting and tile-laying game for 2–6 players that plays in around 20 minutes. It hits retail in August, and if you're looking for something to bring to the beach house, the backyard, or the table before a longer game, look no further!
The premise
A relaxing beach day has turned competitive. You and your fellow players are each building your own sandcastle, racing to see whose ends up most impressive by the time the sun goes down. The theme carries through everything — the art, the components, the breezy pace of play — and it earns it.
How it plays
Each player starts with a Starter Tile that anchors the bottom center of an imaginary 5×5 grid. Over 15 rounds, you'll draft a single tile per round and add it to your sandcastle, building it out and upward within that grid.
The drafting mechanism is where the game gets its teeth. At the start of each round, the active player reveals tiles from a central stack one at a time. You can take the current tile for yourself, or pass it to the player on your left and hope something better turns up. The risk: once you pass, you can't go back! Wait too long, and you may end up forced to take the last tile in the round whether it helps you or not.
It's a simple mechanism, but it creates real tension. Every tile reveal is a small gamble, and reading the table (as you're figuring out when your opponents are getting desperate) is as important as knowing what you want for your own sandcastle.
What are you actually scoring?
Tiles feature a mix of items that score in different ways, which gives Sandcastles more strategic texture than its playtime might suggest:
- Starfish score based on orthogonal adjacency — each connected pair of matching-color starfish is worth 3 points, and chains let a single starfish count in multiple pairs. Collect one of all five colors for a 5-point bonus.
- Windows score by row, with points increasing at specific thresholds. Every tile has two rows of windows, so there are 10 scoreable rows across your 5×5 grid — and filling them efficiently matters more than it first appears.
- Birds appear only on sky tiles and score on a Fibonacci-style escalating track: the more birds you collect, the more each one is worth.
- Shells, shovels, and buckets are worth flat points (1, 2, and 3 respectively), and the player with the most of each earns an end-game bonus.
- Sky tiles float in your top row and drop down to rest on your highest sand tiles at game end. Collect all five and you earn a 5-point bonus.
None of these systems are complicated in isolation, but balancing them across 15 tile picks under drafting pressure AND with a spatial grid constraint is the puzzle Sandcastles asks you to solve.
Sandcastles is hitting retail shelves on August 21, 2026*. Grab your copy before the nest is empty!