Roux Dat: First Impressions of Orloj, and Expansions to Faraway and Castle Combo
The week following the end of the Southern Board Game Fest 2026 just flew by. And after only a few days, the siren song of the cardboard in our collections started calling out to the gang in the Acadiana discord. Luckily, Doug and Mitchell were free for some weekend gaming!
First up, we had been eyeing Doug’s awesome pictures of Orloj: The Prague Astronomical Clock published by Devir as he opened it up, and put together a very handy 3D printed insert. I watched a few videos, and felt like I understand the mechanics but not exactly what were the goals or how to score points. Doug suggested in our chat to put it on the table, and Mitchell and I were on board. It was going to be a learning game for all three of us, but I think we acquitted ourselves pretty well.
The game is actually pretty simple. Players will choose a spot on the clock, and then take the two actions associated with the two gears that rotate on the clock. The actions themselves correspond to blinging out this famous clock in Prague with additional accoutrements, like statutes of the 12 Apostles or zodiac symbols, etc. If you don’t like the actions, you can manipulate the gears just like a real clock, but you have to worry about taking negative points at the end of each round or fix the anomaly as fast as you can.
I focused on building up my player board first, to get a little engine going, and then started hunting for apostle statutes. The turns are snappy, for the most part, but reminded me a bit of The White Castle in that every couple of turns, I was able to combo bonuses that we received from different parts of the board to keep my turn going. By the second reel of the game, we were all producing some really deep turns, filled with end game scoring grabs and resource dumps and extra actions. Orloj is definitely a game that fits my gaming sensibilities. It’s gorgeous, has a fairly easy rule set, and lets you achieve a lot of bubble-wrap-popping dopamine hits from all of the combo-ing without overstaying its welcome. I think this was my first experience playing a game by Abraham Sanchez Hermida, and Paloma J. Pascual, and I am definitely looking to play more.
I was sent some review copies of the expansions to Castle Combo and Faraway, and we still had an hour left or so in our game night, so away we went. We grabbed the Castle Combo: Out of the Oubliette! expansion first. Turns out that it was just a card packet, like the Lorcana or Magic:The Gathering booster packs, but it had a dozen or so cards to throw right into the base game deck. The expansion cards added one new mechanic: cards that can have lock symbols on them (representing outlaws menacing the beautiful castle combo land) that allow you to spend a key on the card to do special actions. Sometimes I extended myself pretty hard chasing after those outlaw cards, but in a good way. Anything that can get you more actions, keys or coins is a good thing. It’s a great little expansion, and honestly we all agreed that there is simply no reason not to add the Oubliette cards to any original box.
Finally, we broke open the expansion pack for Faraway, called Faraway: Under Starry Skies. I’ve never played the original expansion, just the base game, but I loved what this little expansion packet did. It’s roughly the same size as the Castle Combo one but comes with 15 new Meteor cards, that had pink numbers to them. You just shuffle them into the base game (don’t you just love expansions that are that easy) to add cards that will be played face up at the end of the game, instead of face down. So, if they have a resource requirement for them, it should be easy to get that done by the time the card comes up in the order, and since they are face up from the start, if they add any resources to the mix, you get that access from the first play of the reveal. Plus, they have a special power: they make any card that shares the same last number as the pink number also play face up at the end of the game. Again, much easier to complete cards.
Faraway melts my brain with just the base game. It always takes me a throwaway pancake game the first time to grok how we are going to score and pay for resources. We usually play two or three games back to back to let the rules disappear and just start playing the game. We did play two back-to-back games on this game night, and wow, the second one really made sense even if I did not get my hands on many of the meteor cards. Instead, I just focused on grabbing maps and playing my cards in an ascending chain, hoping to get a great engine. Getting two different sanctuaries that paid out for maps was the icing on the cake. Again, there is simply no reason not to add this meteor shower expansion to your base game.
Saturday was a great way to get together a week after the festival, to talk about the roses and thorns from the con, and still get some great gaming in. Can’t wait to play all three games again!
Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler!
— BJ from Board Game Gumbo