20th September 2022 Tuesday is here again and we're with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns in Woking. Recruit and assemble your citizens (Or heroes really.), build domains and vanquish foul enemies in this fantasy adventure themed dice rolling and tableau building game. What's in a game?
Component quality is the usual good quality you'd expect from a modern game like Valeria: Card Kingdoms. Card quality is fine as are the card tokens and the player boards. Wooden tokens for resources are always a welcome addition. The dice are plastic and feel a little 'square' but they have indented numbers which is good. Valeria: Card kingdoms features good art throughout. Cards are well illustrated with colourful chunky pictures of heroic citizens and intriguing domains, my favourite though, is the artwork for monsters that brashly depict menacing enemies. There's quite a lot of iconography throughout the game, from types of heroes and monsters, to terrain types and ability icons. For the most part, they are fairly intuitive - matching the roles on citizen cards to the requirements on domain cards is obvious but some of the abilities, particularly on domain cards are a bit esoteric and will require some looking up in the rulebook. I don't think it's especially beginner or casual friend but by no means is it a gamebreaker either. How's it play? Setup
On to play In Valeria: Card Kingdoms, players will be rolling dice to activate cards to accumulate resources which in turn can be spent to acquire more citizen cards, domains and monsters. The game follows the usual turn structure of the active player taking their actions before player progresses to the player on their left. During a turn, the following phases occur.
Endgame Play in Valeria: Card Kingdoms continues until any 1 of 3 game ending criteria is met, which are:
A player can earn VPs from a variety of sources.
Points are tallied, highest score wins! Overall
I'll start by saying I quite like the implementation of the fantasy theme both in presentation and execution. It is slightly abstract but gathering a band of heroes to go off and fight monsters and build domains feels good. Like many engine and tableau building games, there's a distinct early game in Valeria: Card Kingdoms about players building up their tableau, in this case with citizen cards and a late game about gaining increased resources to acquire monster and domain cards as well as VPs. However, because players get 2 actions during their turn, there's some opportunity for optimised actions, card synchronicity and thus meaningful decisions. Getting the right citizen card can lead to getting a domain card for example. Getting a good domain card early can be a big boon dependant on its ability. This means there will be a fairly constant flow of cards being drafted from the central area. Players will find themselves competing to get the cards they want as quickly as possible and is the game's primary form of interaction between players. In fact: Thanks to every card having an ability that can be activated in other players' turns and also being able to read the dice both individually and as a pair making card activations more common, means the game generally flows quite rapidly. Players will often have something happening outside of their turn. Like many drafting games, there's a higher level of play here that comes from watching what other players are doing and potentially trying to stymie them. The addition of duke cards messes with this though, providing players with unique and unpredictable objectives. Valeria: Card Kingdoms is a solid iteration of the dice rolling, card activating, tableau building game style and players of those games will be on familiar ground here. To compliment this, there's also a couple of innovative touches to do with reading the dice and card activating that make the game fresh. Despite its brisk playtime, the game does has a fairly involved setup process and also an abundance of iconography which makes for a slightly steep learning curve. Don't that put you off though. Valeria: Card Kingdoms is well worth a try.
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