Chateau Roquefort

The Castle of Cheese is filled with lots of gouda stuff for the mice to eat. (I promise -- that's the last cheese pun for this review.) So the players send their four delightfully sculpted mice across the roofs and into the rooms to pick up cheese -- but watch out for trap doors that can send your mice to their doom!

Chateau Roquefort can be enjoyed by both children and adults, although is a much more tactical game when playing with adults. With kids, it's pretty random and the game usually ends with one player losing three of their mice into the dungeons. But it's not like that's a bad thing.

This is also a great introduction for the younger set to action point games. Thankfully, since it's only four actions, it doesn't bog down.

Everything costs one point: moving a space, uncovering an adjacent room, and sliding the floors (which you can only do once per turn.) Somehow, you must combine these moves in order to get two of your mice on the same type of cheese and claim the appropriate cheese scoring marker. Four cheese markers wins the game.

A word about the board is important: it's layered like a trifle. (Obscure quote of the day: "Custard, good. Jam, good. Meat, goooood!") On the bottom is the box with a plastic insert filled with holes. (Yes, it's an oxymoron -- or I'm just a plain ol' moron. Take your pick.)

Above that is a layer of square tiles that slide in rows, very similar to a-MAZE-ing Labyrinth. Over that is a board overlay where some squares are filled and some are open to the tile level. Above that comes a variety of roof tiles that cover two to four squares.

The innovative board design wouldn't mean much, however, if the designers hadn't found a clever game to go with it. Slather a great graphic look (dripping cheese!) and you've got a real winner on your hands.

It's become difficult to get the expansion, Cheesy Gonzola, here in the States. (While the base game was published by Rio Grande, they haven't printed Cheesy Gonzola or the giveaway expansion.) If you like the base game, chances are excellent that you'll love the expansion. It adds:

• Cheesy Gonzola himself -- a "Speedy Gonzales"-like mouse who can't fall in the holes and moves very quickly around the board. Control of Cheesy is determined by the last person to land on his special tile.

• An extra entry tower and a set of mice for a fifth player.

• Some other special expansion tiles, including the Cellar and the Mechanical Works.

• A way to store all of the pieces -- this is possibly the best box insert for a game ever!

The easiest way to get the expansion is through Amazon.de -- shipped, it costs roughly 25 Euros. (More than half of that is shipping, but it should arrive in about a week -- which is pretty amazing coming from Europe.)

The giveaway expansion (which is much harder to find) just adds two double-sided tiles, two of which are included in Cheesy Gonzola. The other two sides (the Cat and the Dirty Sock) are new.

I think you would need to be 6 years old or so to be able to play at a decent level. Setup and tear-down is a bit tricky for younger kids, but doable with some practice.

Chateau Roquefort is for 2 to 4 players (5 players with the Cheesy Gonzola expansion), ages 6 and up. It was designed by Bernhard Weber and Jens-Peter Schliemann and published by Rio Grande Games / Zoch.