Castle of Magic (board game)

Castle of Magic is a fantasy board game published by RiddleMaster Games in 1991, in which players take on the roles of wizards competing to recover three items of power, a bell, a book and a candle, after a monster invades Castle Bondi. The game uses a 20 by 20 inch board along with 64 playing cards, 16 wizard cards and two six-sided dice, and its 8-page rulebook keeps the rules relatively light compared to larger hobbyist strategy titles of the era. Reviewer Lester W. Smith praised the design as highly entertaining despite noting that its physical components had a fairly plain visual presentation, a common trade-off for smaller publishers like RiddleMaster Games working with limited production budgets. As a small-press fantasy title from the early 1990s, it reflects the wider boom in independently published tabletop games during that period, when publishers outside the largest companies could still reach players through hobby shops and mail order with a compact, quest-themed design.