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!)
Seasons
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.
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16th April 2019
Gaming night continued at 'The Sovs'. We finished the night with some piratical shenanigans in 'Loot'. You can read my blog post about it here. 16th April 2019
Welcome to Tuesday night gaming at 'The Sovereigns'. We kicked off with a return to 'The Lost Expedition' after last week's drubbing we were eager for a better result. - Which we got! Score! You can read my blog post about The Lost Expedition here. 9th April 2019
It's Tuesday and gaming continue at 'The Sovs'. The next game is 'The Lost Expedition'. A co-operative game about trekking through the jungle. Needless to say - as is common in this game - we met a sticky end. You can read my blog post about The Lost Expedition here. 9th April 2019
Tuesday has come around again, so it's time for some gaming at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking. Perennial favourite amongst many people I play with and a good starter for the evening is Port Royal. You can read my blog about it here. 6th April 2019
It's a Saturday evening, so it's an evening of gaming at Matakishi's. And on this particular evening we played Trains: Rising Sun. Trains: Rising Sun combines 3 key elements to make it what is is:
This game is a expansion/standard alone game (I guess that's where the imaginative name 'Rising Sun' comes from). What's in a game? Trains: Rising Sun uses a game board which depicts a map, a map that is overlaid with hexes (familiar territory for the players' of many, many train games) and you can build cities, connect rail links etc. Definitely familiar territory! However the actions you take on the board are dictated by the cards you play from your hand of cards. The Cards Each player begins the game with a deck of 10 cards, 7 of which generate currency and 3 of which 'do things'. Each player draws 5 cards from their deck into their hand. So far so 'Dominion'! Currency cards generate money that allow you to buy cards from a selection of cards to add to your discard pile. These cards give you extra abilities, more revenue etc. When your draw deck runs out, your discard pile is shuffled into a draw deck, allowing you to draw and use the newly acquired cards. Other cards such as 'Lay Rails' allows the player to errr lay rails! However it costs to lay rails. So your currency cards are also required to build railways. This is great as it forces you to make choices. 'Do I want to make use of the lay rails in my hand right now and miss out on that card I want?' For example. There's an additional mechanic in this game called 'Waste'. Certain actions and cards generate waste. Each time waste is generated by a player, they take a 'Waste' card from the relevant stack and add it to your discard pile. Sooner or later you'll start drawing waste cards into your hand. What do waste cards do for you? As you probably surmised, they do nothing for you and clog up space in your hand and just get in the way. There are various cards and actions that allow you to take waste cards out of your deck and return them to their stack. It's a clever little mechanic that adds an extra layer of consideration when choosing your actions. The Board The board is double sided and features different terrain. It has hexes, rail links at the edges, cities, rivers etc. It's all very familiar. You use the board to build and connect cities to score points according to the cards that you play. That's the rules in a nutshell. This hybridization of 2 different game styles works perfectly well. Without going into specifics about the rules, there's little more to write about the game. |
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