Kingsburg

If you've read some of my recent reviews, you'd notice that I seem to be harping on games heavily for incorporating dice-rolling in their combat systems. This might seem strange to people who know me even a little, as my two favorite games (Twilight Imperium and D&D) are based around rolling die to fight. Perhaps I'm being a bit too harsh on those games, and maybe I need something to help out with my irrational hatred of unfamilar dice rolling combat.

Kingsburg seems to be a step in the right direction for me. Like Liar's Dice or To Court the King (affectionately called Yahtzee: The Gathering in our group), its mechanics are almost entirely based in rolling six-sided die. Speaking of To Court the King, Kingsburg borrows a lot of themes and ideas from that game while polishing said ideas to lustering shine. In both games, your roll of your dice determines which characters you can claim turning your turn. These characters in both games provide varying benefits, and the higher you roll the better the characters get as far as their abilities are concerned. This is where the two games diverge some, while To Court the King's theme is almost an after thought to the mechanics of rolling dice and tapping cards for stuff to happen, Kingsburg tries its hand at being a civilization-building game. Where To Court the Kings characters provide you with the means to add and manipulate dice in your quest to roll 7-of-a-kind, Kingsburg's characters provide you with the resources you'll need to build your city and fight off the enemies that attack at the end of a round. It's a neat twist that provides some real strategy to an otherwise mindless game. Do you intentionally take a lower character to get that stone instead of the gold? Do you go with a militarized city that'll help you fight bad guys, or do you go with an industrialized hamlet to more effectively gather resources? This was the fun of the game for me, and I found that the near constant dice-rolling to be a lot of fun.

Kingsburg is not perfect. As demonstrated in our session, it's VERY easily to essentially get knocked out of the game with a bad first round. Additionally some of the characters vastly more powerful than others, the king and queen being prime examples of this. The queen is superior to the king, providing more benefit for a point less than the mighty king. This is an obvious nod to the power behind the throne being more effective than the guy sitting as king, but I feel like I've seen this before. Additionally the game suffers from what all chance-based games do, and that players simply getting screwed by bad rolls at bad times. It's almost unavoidable in games of this type, like faulting Twilight Imperium for being to complicated and long while it's simply part of the game. I would also like more monsters to fight, but all of these complaints are relatively minor. Kingsburg is a fun and easy to learn dice-fest that will continue to entertain me for sometime. I'm glad that it seems to be getting more popular with my group, and I hope that it hits the table again soon. Since I'm considering buying my own copy, I'm giving this one a 8/10. Fantastic game, beautifully packaged, and easy for anyone to get into.

Here now is a video of the first round of play. Well, not quite all of it, but you get the idea.