When I get the chance, it’s always fun to thematically pair a game with its food. For this throwback Thursday, I’m looking back to about a year ago when we introduced some friends to some Prussian / Austrian themed games and ate an awesome apricot torte! Read on to for the full breakdown, and check out the At a Glance tables for the stats.

At a Glance…

Austrian Apricots

I’ll be honest that I did not personally make this cake. My food contribution to this game day was my mom’s Reuben recipe. For those who don’t know the delights of the sandwich, I grew up having it as follows: Jewish Rye bread, Swiss cheese, Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut, and corn beef. Now that I’m vegan, we do our best to find similar ingredients (aka vegan swiss or provolone cheese, vegan corn beef, etc), and we’ve been having it this way for so long that it’s all I know now. Some might call it a monstrosity of the original, I call it doing what you must to still eat the nostalgic things of your childhood. How about you? Any foods from your childhood you’ve had to revamp since becoming vegan?

Anyway, the Reubens were lovely, but my friend’s contribution really took the cake, haha. She made this delightful Austrian Apricot Torte (link in At a Glance table), and after looking at the recipe and website recently, I’m realizing I need to explore this website more thoroughly! It is of course vegan, and even gluten free! The jam in the middle was soooo good. My friend said she used a brown sugar creamer in lieu of milk, so she cut down the sugar a bit. After discussing it with her today, we both decided it is time to revisit this tasty treat.

Architecture & Aristocracy

Castles of Mad King Ludwig is one of the earlier additions to our game collection. It is such a ridiculous theme, but historical! Apparently there really was a King Ludwig, and his castle was quite…eccentric. You’ll find fantastic rooms to build like the mold room and bowling alley, the Venus grotto, and panic room and there are rooms we always have to google (berchta room? tasso room?). In this game, you do a kinda unique thing where you take turns being the master builder, setting the cost of the rooms for the round. Then people buy rooms, paying you, and put them into their castles, taking into account what those rooms want to be next to for optimal scoring and thematic logic. The tricky thing is how do you price it? If you price things too cheap, you won’t make enough money, too expensive and people won’t buy them. And then what about the room you want to buy? You go last, so how do you price the room you want so it’s still affordable for you but not purchased by others? Ah, decisions. In the end, the best part is going around and giving a tour of your castle. It’s kinda a pain to set up, so I do recommend this insert from Broken Token to ease in set up. This is such a fun one to introduce to non-gamers and makes for a great welcoming evening.

Grand Austria Hotel is a step up in complexity from Castles, but also very fun thematically! You are running a hotel in Austria, as well as a cafe connected to the hotel. In the game, you are attracting guests to your cafe and feeding them strudel, cake, wine, and coffee. Then they get to stay in the rooms you’ve prepared for them; how nice! This is all done through dice drafting. The different dice represent the types of actions you can do, such as getting those resources, preparing rooms, making the emperor happy (very important), and getting money (which can be tight!). The game can be a bit long at 4 players, which I’ve heard the expansion helps to fix. We still need to check that out. The original game came with boring cubes, but who wants to feed their guests cubes?? Not I. Definitely grab these upgraded bits from Top Shelf Gamer for a premium experience for you and your guests.

If you’re in for a Central European kinda evening, check out both these games and cake! I’m already thinking about when I can make it again 😀

Want to buy these games? Check out your friendly local game store (FLGS), Amazon [here], or get a first-order discount at Board Game bliss [here].

Or Get Grand Austria Hotel at Amazon.ca or Amazon.com or get Castles of Mad King Ludwig on Amazon.