A friend of mine hosted a small game day at his place this weekend, the highlight of which was Kingsburg.
Kingsburg is a worker placement type game with dice luck and a nice fantasy theme. The idea is that all the players in the game are charged with helping defend a kingdom from a monster that will attack in the winter. During the other three seasons each of the players prepares for the coming of the monster by building up their military strength and gathering resources to produce buildings that aid you throughout the game. The buildings have to be built in order along various specialized tracks; for example, I focused on a track that gave military advantages and maxed it out by the end of the game, but I couldn't have just jumped to the biggest building. Other tracks involve trading goods for points or various other bonuses.
In order to produce each player rolls three dice each turn. On the game board are eighteen advisors, numbered in sequence, all of whom bestow goods and/or advantages. Each round the players take turns recruiting help by spending their dice point for point on a given advisor. You can either spend all your dice at once (for example, if you happen to roll an eighteen you're probably going to go with the King at the top of the board) or splitting up your rolls among multiple advisors. The catch is that only one advisor can be recruited at a time and you have to meet the point total of the advisor precisely; if you roll a 13 you can't just put your dice on the 12 - it's the thirteen or splitting the dice among other advisors. Fortunately, there are tokens you can obtain that can be added to your dice total, to help you get that high-point advisor you need. There are also buildings that can affect your dice selection.
The end result is a lot of fun. You spend a lot of time looking around at the board and trying to pull off optimal advisor recruiting before the other players screw you. The lower point advisors are generally more cost effective than a lot of the higher point advisors in terms of converting points on the dice into goods. However, they tend to be squabbled over and so you'll often find yourself taking a less optimal high-point advisor just to make sure you get what you need that turn. This can be crucial - I went from a strong second place to dead last at the end of the game after making a terrible decision in the penultimate round. Cue lots of kicking myself, but it was my own fault and not the games, which ain't bad for something with this much dice luck involved. Meanwhile, as the game goes along you're getting points for successful monster fights, the buildings you're producing, and various other factors. The game ends when the monster (who is increasingly powerful each year) is fought five times, at which point the player with the most points wins.
So, despite my choking at the last minute, I'd recommend Kingsburg to anyone interested in a lighter sort of worker placement sort of game, such as Agricola. Don't get me wrong, I love the delicate combination of farming and pain Agricola offers, but it's nice to play something that isn't as harsh from time to time. And, as it's a Fantasy Flight game, there's the
requisite expansion to keep the game interesting after a while. The expansion is modular so you can throw in what you want; we added power cards and a couple of additional production tracks and they seemed like nice additions to the game.
The rest of the game day featured yours truly also coming in dead last at Agricola (I didn't play a bad game or anything and the final totals were pretty close, but I was still the caboose), my sucking hard at two spatial/tile placement games (
Genesis and
The Downfall of Pompei, neither of which are much my thing), and my pulling out a win in plain ol' Settlers. At least the latter helped soothe my battered gaming ego a bit. All in all, a good time was had by all and, while I need to spend more time playing Stone Age before I run out and buy another worker placement/dice luck game, I enjoyed the hell out of Kingsburg and have it on my mental to-buy list.
FnordChan