Sunday, December 14, 2008

Sunday, Dec 14th 2008 - Kingsburg

This morning three of the kids and I played Kingsburg for the first time. I bought the game the day before on advice of Nevin and read the rules last night.

Cody - Red Lion
John - Black Hawk
Claire - Green Dragon
Christine - Yellow Stag

Description from Boardgamegeek:
In Kingsburg, players are Lords sent from the King to administer frontier territories.

The game takes place over five years, a total of 20 turns. In every year, there are 3 production seasons for collecting resources, building structures, and training troops. Every fourth turn is the winter, in which all the players must fight an invading army. Each player must face the invaders, so this is not a cooperative game.

The resources to build structures and train troops are collected by influencing the advisers in the King's Council. Players place their influence dice on members of the Council. The player with the lowest influence dice sum will be the first one to choose where to spend his/her influence; this acts as a way of balancing poor dice rolling. Even with a very unlucky roll, a clever player can still come out from the Council with a good number of resources and/or soldiers.

Each adviser on the King's Council will award different resources or allocate soldiers, victory points, and other advantages to the player who was able to influence him/her for the current turn.

At the end of five years, the player who best developed his assigned territory and most pleased the King through the Council is the winner.

Many alternate strategies are possible to win: will you go for the military way, disregarding economic and prestige buildings, or will you aim to complete the big Cathedral to please the King? Will you use the Merchant's Guild to gain more influence in the Council, or will you go for balanced development?


At the end of each year, during the Winter phase, a random invader will attack the kingdom. In the first 4 turns the invaders did not do any damage to any of the players. On the final game turn, a strength 8 Demon hoard attacked. Only Cody managed to defeat them (I rolled a '1' for King's Troops) with Claire tying them and Christine and I being defeated losing a Cathedral and Town Hall in the process. After the adjustments to the Victory points, Cody won by a large margin.

Cody - 40 points.
John - 26 points
Claire - 23 points
Christine - 20 points

The kids said they enjoyed the game so it will be played more at the Boone House.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The kids liked it...and you?

John said...

It was good.