First Impressions of Goths Save The Queen

What else is a Goth-ic(?) princess to do except wait around to be rescued by whichever… pair… of fellas that are brave enough to rescue her? What a lucky gal!

Or wait. Is this supposed to be a Queen? Then what is she doing imprisoned on a card and shouldn’t she already be married to one of the Kings fighting over her?

Stop it. No. Stop asking questions. The story is not the point. It’s probably just their culture. Or something.

Goths Save The Queen, aside from being a wonderfully awful pun, is a quick card game intended for 2 teams of 2 players. Each team is commanding a tribe of Goths (that is, of the Visigoth variety rather than 80s music throwbacks) racing to rescue an available princess from her prison somewhere in the middle row of cards. Sadly, bureaucracy is such that all orders from the King need to be understood and relayed to the troops by the Warchief in what will certainly demonstrate that the right hand has no idea what the left is doing.

Player 1 (the King) will play a card face down on the table. This is the order they wish to see performed. On the back is an image indicating one of two possible orders. Player 2 on the team (the Warchief) then choses a card hoping desperately to match the order given. Because obviously they can’t talk to each other! Once both sides have completed this ritual the cards are flipped and everyone starts shouting at each other…

The objective is to get your Visigoth standees to the princess/queen before the others do. But you can happily throw axes at each other, load and then launch your pig-flinging catapult (waste of good bacon if you ask me…), scout the row of cards to find out where the princess/queen actually is, and barricade tiles to hide from said axes. This provides you with plenty of options for completely screwing up your order interpretation and this is where most of the joy of the game comes from. Screwing up is just funny! And of course once you as a pair get good, besting your opponents feels like a great achievement. It’s not a hugely deep game, but as a neat, small box game, it doesn’t have to be! Goths Save The Queen was a lot of fun and well worth a look!

This first impression is based on a demo at Essen. Check out the other games I got to play at Essen, and links to other articles, here!