The Palaces of Carrara (Second Edition) (Deluxe Edition)

The upgrade from cardboard coins to metal coins is a nice premium, but the rest of the components are all just cardboard tiles and painted wooden pieces - the basic standard in most games. The decorations do also have a printed-on design, but that hardly justifies such an over-inflated price.

The game comes with cardboard punch-outs to assemble into little storage boxes, but they’re not the greatest quality, and I had to glue them all after assembly to make sure they stayed assembled. They’re difficult to make fit in the box - too tight a fit. It would have been much easier to just include a custom insert to hold all the components.

Also, one complaint about the game board: there’s a plastic base for the wheel that you have to insert into a cutout on the board. That’s fine, but because of the way they designed the board to fold closed, you can’t just leave the plastic piece in place. You have to remove it every time, or else you can’t fold up the game board flat. Annoying that they didn’t think of this when designing how the board folds.

For the actual quality of the components and what you get, I’d say this game is only worth about half the cost (around $86). Even with the upgraded coins, I wouldn’t pay more than $95. Had I known, I would have just opted for the basic version and used my own upgraded metal coins. I’ve seen way better production quality and much better upgraded components in “deluxe” versions of games for a MUCH LOWER price.

Buyer beware!