First Impressions of Kingsburg

 

Kingsburg is a game that defied my expectations. A game for which all appearances may well be deceptive. I’m not even sure I should be writing this first impression! But then, in a round about sort of way, perhaps that’s the perfect reason for a first impression…

Kingsburg is a game of city development, in an abstract sense. You can build new buildings like defensive towers, marketplaces and statues that will award VPs or some bonus like a resource or military strength, but they also make available the next building in that same row of your grand city building blueprint. Not everything can be built in a single game (of course) so you’ll be forced to chose one or two rows to work on as your strategy for each game.

To collect the resources you need to build a fabulous city, you’ll be rolling dice and placing them gently on to the various important characters of the city to gain their benefit. You have 3 dices, and can combine them in any way you like to gain 1-3 of the available 18 actions. Put all 3 dice together and you’ll gain one big bonus, or split them up and perform several simpler tasks, so long as someone doesn’t beat you to that spot. There are ways of gaining dice modifying chits, but they are always in short supply. Since higher numbers gain you substantial actions, and at the least more versatility, a run of bad dice rolls would seem to put in a significantly weaker position. And yet, Chris’ simply awful dice rolls didn’t see him crash out of the game. Is this a testament to the game’s balance, or Chris’ mad skillz?

 

 

But the game is not all noble, happy, building a better life for everyone nonsense. There are dark clouds on the horizon, and every year the forces of darkness descend upon your cities (at least, in your imagination they do). Those players with insufficient military strength, either from their buildings or by gathering it directly from placement of their dice, will pay a steep price. Or so I understand because it never happened to anyone. We were all sufficiently terrified and always rolled well on the “military die”. Every one of us had invested time into the military row of our city, and it felt like you would be taking a big risk not doing so. But this would suggest some rows are absolutely better than others and limit what choices you are free to make? Perhaps Kingsburg is daring you to try your luck, to take a high risk, high reward approach and neglect your defences, after all, the dice may fall in your favour?

I felt like luck was a big factor in Kingsburg, yet we all ended with very similar scores. I felt like the military buildings were almost necessities, and yet the invaders never really came close to causing damage. So perhaps all I can say for certain is I don’t know what to think! It was certainly fun, particularly those final turns as you scramble to build those final VP rich buildings. So I guess I’m curious. Curious to see whether my doubts will be disproven with repeated plays. But I certainly look forward to those repeated plays!