Kingdomino Review

Kingdomino is what happens when Carcassone and Dominoes have a few too many and give in to their long held attraction. But it’s its own game too, determined to live life in the fast lane. While it’s old stuffy parents may look on disapprovingly, Kingdomino is determined to let loose and have some fun! Does it succeed? Let’s find out.

Kingdomino

Players: 2-4

Time: 15-20 mins

Ages: 8+


Players kick things off with their own little cardboard castle that serves no purpose other than looking pretty, and their monarch meeple of indeterminate gender, who will be spending their time at the land market with the other monarchs selecting the land that they’ll add to their kingdom each round. Which sounds like a bizarre way of discovering what’s in your kingdom, until you realise that is exactly what happened to Africa at the Berlin Conference… Annnyyywaaay, in case you’ve never been to one, this is what a land market looks like.

Kingdomino Market
“Get your forests! Two forests for the price o’ one!”

During your exhilarating first turn (no one forgets losing their land market virginity) and in seating order your king/queenple will stride over to one of the tiles and stake their claim to it. And because you are all polite neighbours you will graciously accept that situation and choose a different tile until the last player discovers what tile they’ve been left with. But don’t worry that’s not a problem at all. Because as soon as you’ve made that decision the next thick cardboard slabs of earth are rolling into the market ready to be selected.

Kingdomino Market 2

And now your order is set by the choice you made (or didn’t make) earlier. The player at the top of the market is always the one to go first, giving them the best selection of options. But each tile is also numbered, so that when a new set of tiles is drawn, they can be placed in the market in order with, of course, the best bits of land being at the bottom of the market. But what qualifies for a good bit of land? Well…

What you’re trying to do is to create large regions of identical terrain, so that your tourism board can have compelling marketing campaigns like “the biggest forests”, or “delightful ocean views”. Hey, I’m a board game reviewer not a marketer! But you also want it to be good terrain, and you know a region is good terrain when someone has put a crown in it (and, presumably, no one has nicked it). Compellingly, these crowns act as multipliers to your region’s value, with the score for a region being equal to the number of terrain segments of that type in one continuous region, multiplied by the number of crowns in it. Thus, you can have the largest wheat field in the known world, but if you haven’t got a crown on it, ain’t nobody want to know.

Kingdomino Crowns

As you choose your new tile, you’ll take the previously claimed tile and add it to your steadily expanding Kingdom with the following PERFECTLY THEMATIC restrictions. One of the two tile segments must be touching a matching terrain type, which is the domino element of Kingdomino. And the whole kingdom must fit inside a 5 by 5 square. Any tile you can’t place within these rules must be thrown away. The castle, being full of parties and booze, is a wild terrain type, so anything can be placed next to it, which is good, because otherwise you wouldn’t even be able to start playing.

Once the stack of tiles is empty and the kingdoms are complete (or embarrassingly missing a couple of sections) it’s time to score. Thanks to the multiplicative scoring system and the lack of a scoring pad, this becomes either an exercise in mental agility or a couple of minutes tapping away at your phone. Not exactly ideal but one of the good things these scoring systems do, as they did in Scythe, is to obfuscate who is winning. You can have a good idea, glancing across the table to see a mass of crown heavy mines in one spot probably will be worth a lot of points, but is it actually worth that much more than your giant 2 or even 3 crown forest? You won’t know for sure until final scoring. Unless you sit there adding up everyone’s scores every turn. Don’t sit there adding up everyone’s scores.

Kingdomino Land

Kingdomino is a wonderful little game. The artwork is subtle, colourful and full of delightful little touches. It plays almost as fast as you can grab tiles from the box and while the decisions aren’t overly taxing, they do matter. Going higher in the market might let you get the perfect tile next round… Or it might be a rubbish spread. It’s a touch of push your luck, there’s a sliver of hate drafting, and the sometimes agonising decision of how to position your tiles. It’s just enough to make this ultra slick filler hold your attention. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Rating: Kingly

 

Our copy of Kingdomino was provided for review by Coiledspring Games

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