Kingsburg

17th April 2019

It's 'kebab night' round at my place. What's kebab got to do with gaming?

Well Matt has bought his copy of Kingsburg round to my place for us to play we did!

Kingsburg is a dice/worker placement game where each player has their own board to track personal advances.
It is a fantasy themed game that casts the players as provincial advisors who are seeking to influence the king, battle with invading armies and gain personal power.

Kingsburg is played over 5 'game' years and each year has 4 seasons and 4 'inter-seasonal' phases as well. So a total 40 'phases'. Although in reality players only get to do stuff in 3 seasons a year. So players only get 15 'actions' per game.

---

What's in the game?

Province Sheets
Each player gets their own individual game board called a 'Province Sheet' that tracks their individual developments and advances. These all take the form of buildings that the player can construct. These can provide the player with victory points or other benefits. They give Kingsburg a slight engine-building mechanic, buildings give players little advantages here or there and buildings can also play off other buildings in your province for better advantages.
Each player is also given their own coloured set of 3 six-sided (3d6) dice.

The Game Board
The main game board tracks various elements of the game. Score, military strength, turn order, year and phase and so on.
There are also 18 spaces. Each space represents a different advisor and is numbered from 1 to 18.  Is that a normal amount of advisors for the king of a fantastical medieval kingdom? I guess so.
Each space also generally has one or more resource markers on it. Resources include, gold, stone, wood and military strength.

How does it play?
Each year is divided up into 8 phases. I'll describe the even phases and then the season phases - 3 of which basically function identically.
Phases 1, 3, 5 & 7 are events.
Phases 2, 4, 6 & 8 are spring, summer, autumn and winter respectively. Player actions all occur in the first 3 seasons. Something different occurs during winter. During winter... there is war. Which is about the stupidest time to wage war. Maybe the designers are fans of Game of Thrones (Urggh, felt a little dirty mentioning that!)

• Phase 1 - Bonus die; the player with the least amount of buildings gets a bonus die (explained below). It's a strange thing to start a game with. But there you go.
• Phase 3 - Victory Point Reward; the player with the most buildings at this stage gains a victory point.
• Phase 5 - Extra Action Marker; the player with the fewest buildings gets the marker - which they can only use in the next season. This allows them to do one of the following: Influence an advisor that has already been influenced or in the building phase, build an extra building.
• Phase 7 - Recruitment; players have the opportunity to spend resources to increase their military strength in the face of upcoming war.

 
Seasons

• Phase's 2, 4 & 6 - spring, summer & autumn. This is where most of the game takes place.
• Every player rolls their 3 dice (and bonus dice, if they have any), this determines order of play AND which advisors they can possibly influence.
• How does this work. Let's say that it has come to my turn. On the 3 dice I rolled a 3, 4, 5. How do I use them to influence advisors. You will remember that earlier I explained how the game board has 18 advisors numbered from 1-18. I simply put dice equal to the value of an advisor on to that advisor's space.
• I could all 3 dice on space 12 (3+4+5=13).
• I could put the 3 on space 3, the 4 on space 4 and the 5 on space 5.
• Or the 3 on space 3 and the 4 and 5 on space 9 (4+5=9).
• Or any combination of the dice.
• If you have any bonus dice, they can be played with your other dice, but never alone.
• You can only influence 1 advisor at a time regardless of how many dice you do or do not use and play goes around the table in the turn order. Furthermore an advisor can only be influenced by one player at time. Only dice from one player may occupy a space at a time.
• So if you have a 5 and an opponent has a 5 amongst their dice, you may want to place your dice first, locking theirs out!
• Play continues until all dice have been placed (or discarded).
• Then going in order of the advisor numbering, each player space-by-space take their Resources for each of their dice.
• Resources include, gold, wood and stone. As well as military strength, bonus tokens and the opportunity to look at the invading army card, (More about this later). Once all the resources have been collected, then play progresses to the next phase.

​

• The next phase is building.
• Each province sheet has 5 rows of 4 buildings.
• You can construct buildings in any row. But only the left-most building can be built. Thus if you want the 4th building in a row, the first 3 must be built beforehand. The last building in a row tends to be pretty good.
• Buildings have a cost in gold, wood and stone. Unusually here, stone is the most valuable and hardest to acquire resource: Gold and wood appear twice in the first 6 spaces. But the earliest space in which stone actually appears is 7. This means that it requires at least 2 dice to get stone, (barring usage of a +2 token or special ability off of a building you have built). This feels strangely counter-intuitive and is probably a deliberate design decision.
• Once constructed, a building will give you some sort of benefit, these can be one off like victory points or some sort of continuing in game benefit.

 

• The final season (and final phase of the year) is winter.
• Every winter without fail, one of the kingdom's enemies will attack, zombies, orcs or whatever. And every province must join the battle.
• How's this done? It's pretty simple actually. First a die is rolled and it's result is added to every player's military strength to give a final score.
• Each year has 5 different invader cards, one of these is randomly revealed and will have a type of enemy and a military strength. Each player compares their strength to that of the card
• If the player's strength is higher, victory. And to the victor, go the spoils. In Kingsburg, this will probably be a victory point or two or some resources.
• If the strength scores tie, then the enemy is driven off and there's no reward or loss.
• If the player's strength is lower, then they lose. This will mean losing something. This might be resources of even a building (losing a building must really suck).
• That's all ther is to it! Well, there's 2 other things worth noting about the battles.
• At the end of each year, every player's military strength is reset to zero. Those supposedly loyal soldiers never hang around for more than a year.
• The strength of the invading armies increases year after year.

And that's it for a general overview of the rules. As always I've left some stuff out.

---

How does it play?

Well... Well it plays... OK.

I'm trying to think of something I liked about Kingsburg and something I hated. I came up with zero for both. It's just... sort of... OK.

So the central mechanic is interesting, but seems quite weird. Being quite luck based, sometimes it could be infuriating. But conversely (and strangely), frequently it would feel like it didn't matter what I rolled, because there would be multiple routes to get what I needed.
I found this strange mix of sometimes needing luck and sometimes luck not mattering not very compelling.

Constructing a building doesn't feel like an accomplishment much of the time, nor does it feel like the bonuses it grants change the game much.
It's fairly straightforward to construct the first and maybe second buildings in a row, but because of the slightly haphazard way in which you gain resources, planning for the buildings further along is much trickier and your well-laid plans can easily be scuppered by a bad dice roll. The later buildings can be much more useful, but by the time you get to building them, the game will 80% over, thwarting their usefulness. You really need to plan to get these  buildings, but the game seems to scupper plans. Quite often your forced to choose between trying to save resources for even longer to get a building, or giving up on it and getting something else instead.

Choice is always good as I've said in this blog before. But the choices here tend to be about choosing between the least undesirable option. It feels negative and leaves a little bitter taste in the mouth.

War in the winter season seems not so well thought about. Quite often I would completely ignore/forget about it and the dice roll alone was enough to defeat enemies in the first couple of years. During the 3 other seasons, you would probably get some military strength as a by product of playing. So I never felt the need to invest in military strength.

Overall, I don't think Kingsburg is a bad game by any stretch and if asked if I wanted to play it, I wouldn't immediately say 'no'. But I might ask what else they had to play.