The King Is Dead

Another week, another boardgame ...

One of the people I follow on Twitter is attempting a far more ambitious project than my 52 Games. He's attempting to play a board- or card-game every day of the year! Sometimes face to face, sometimes online sometimes solo, but he's playing something every day. Although there are some repeats, I think he's already played more different games than I have.

Anyway, a few weeks ago he posted a photo of a small, simple boardgame that looked very attractive, so I looked it up and decided to buy it. It's 'The King Is Dead'. My copy arrived yesterday and I played it with Catherine this afternoon.

It's nominally set in medieval Britain. The king has just died and the country is divided as three factions vie for control - The Scots (blue), the English (yellow) and the Welsh (red). The players - it's designed for two or three or two teams of  two - represent nobles trying to be the power behind the throne by assembling a court friendly to whichever faction comes out on top in the battle for the country. They are looking to have the greatest influence with the winning faction or, if the conflict triggers a French invasion, be the person who unites the factions against the invader.

Here's the board a turn or so into a game. It's a very pretty game.

So how does the game play?

The board is divided into eight regions, and each gets four tokens, mostly at random. The tokens, of course, correspond to the three factions, so will be red, yellow or blue. When a player takes their turn they can either play an action card then recruit a follower, or they can pass. The former allows them to play one of these cards:

Each player has a hand of eight cards. In fact each player has the same combination of cards, so you always know what they have left in their hand at any point in the game. Playing a card allows you to add, remove or move tokens, changing the balance of power in one or more regions. You then recruit a follower to your court by taking any one token from the board and placing it in front of you. As you can see, a game is limited to each player taking no more than eight actions.

If you pass, and all of the other players pass consecutively, then you resolve the power struggle in one region. The order in which the regions are resolved is random and determined at the start of the game - it's the cards lining the edge of the board in the pictures above and below. The faction with the most tokens in a region controls it; the tokens are removed and a coloured disc placed in the region to show its allegiance. In this game, Lancaster, Devon, Essex and Strathclyde have been resolved; the first three are controlled by the English and Strathclyde by the Scots.

A game ends when all eight regions are resolved, when a coronation takes place or if the French invade.

The French? Yes. They get in on the action too. If the struggle in a region cannot be resolved, because there is a tie for the most tokens, or it has no tokens at all, then it becomes unstable, and a black marker is placed in it. If three regions end up with black markers, then the game ends. This picture shows a game that has ended with a French invasion after all of the first three power struggles were inconclusive.

The two different ways the game can end affect how victory is determined. If  a coronation takes place then you count up which faction has the most areas under its control. Then the player with the most tokens of that colour in their court wins. This is a clever mechanism. In order to back a faction you must remove from the board the very pieces that they are using to control the regions. It's a tricky balance.

And if the French invade? Then the player with the most sets of tokens wins. A set consist of one red, one yellow and one blue. Which is, of course, a tricky thing to get if you are trying to build up a court aligned to one faction. The two victory conditions are, in a way, mutually exclusive.

Catherine and I played three games. The first ended in a full-on tie - we both backed each of the three factions with the same number of tokens, but Catherine had used up her hand first, and that's the absolute tie-breaker. So she won that one. In the second game, as shown above, I engineered three disputed power-struggles and forced a French invasion. Having collected a couple of sets whilst Catherine was trying to back a single faction I took the win. In the third game Catherine backed the English heavily, but I managed to ensure that the Welsh just pipped them to the post when the last three regions were resolved. Unfortunately we had both backed the Welsh equally, so the tie-break went to control of the second strongest faction - the English. So another win for Catherine.

And that's it. In its basic form it's a game with no luck; once the draw of tokens and region order is made, all of the game information is visible to all of the players all of the time, and there's no random element in any of the actions. An advanced version mixes some random cards into the player decks, so you aren't quite sure what your opponent has; we'll try that in some future games once we've a clearer idea of the strategy of the basic version. I'm looking forward to trying a three-player game as well.

52 Games - Game 29