Players: 2-5
Time: 15 minutes
Difficulty: 1 (of 10)

The Components

King of the Beasts comes with 66 animal cards, 1 voting board, and 1 rulebook.

Animal Cards: These square cards are printed on full-color, linen-textured cardstock. I generally don't like them. They're flimsy, and also have sharp corners.

Each card shows one of the 6 claimants (dragons, krakens, manticores, gryphons, unicorns, and salamanders) for the role of King of the Beasts. The artwork is helpfully reprinted, in miniature, at the four corners so you can fan your cards and still see what you have. The artwork is all pretty good, and there's nice & vibrant colors on the cards.

Board: A tall, thin three-panel board printed on cardboard with a nice, textured back. It shows the six claimants in tie-breaking order, and also lists the number of cards for each critter, from 10-12.

Rulebook: A large, 8-page, full-color rulebook. The actual rules are only 2 pages long, but are repeated in 3 languages (English, French, Spanish). There's some good, illustrated examples, and the rules are generally easy to follow ... except one crucial rule was left out (on which, more later).

Overall, I was pretty disappointed with the components of King of the Beast. I'm used to card games coming in pretty oversized boxes sometimes, but when I opened this one, I felt like it was almost empty. Combine that with the low quality of the cards and you get a Style rating of "2". The components are all easy to use, but the value proposition of the game is poor.

The Gameplay

The object of King of the Beasts is to elect as King of the Beasts a critter that you've put lots of bids on.

Setup: The voting board is placed in the middle of the table. Each player is dealt 5 cards. A five-card pool is dealt face-up in the middle of the table.

Play: During his turn a player can take two actions: draw and (optionally) meld. Afterward the pool is refreshed.

Drawing: A player draws by declaring one of the six critter types (dragon, kraken, manticore, gryphon, unicornn, salamander). He then takes all of the cards of that type from the face-up pool into his hand.

Melding: A player may optionally meld. This means taking 2-6 cards from his hand, each portraying the same animal, and placing 1-3 of them next to the voting board and 1-3 of them in a face-down scoring stack in front of himself.

(For example, a player may meld 4 dragons, placing 3 in the voting area and 1 in his scoring pile, or 2 in each, or 1 in the voting area and 3 in his scoring pile.)

Refreshing: After a player's turn the additional cards are drawn and placed into the face-up pool so that it again totals 5.

Ending the Game: The game ends when one critter gets six votes, at which point he is named King of the Beasts. In addition, the runner-ups are named. These are the next two critters with the most votes, or in cases of ties the critters highest on the voting board (which runs from Dragons to Salamanders).

Now each player totals up their scoring pile. Each card they have belonging to the King of the Beasts is worth 2 points and each card they have for one of the runner-ups is worth 1 point. The player with the highest score wins.

Alternate Ending Condition: The rules leave out what happens if you run out of cards and no one got six votes. I got the following missing rule from Playroom Entertainment:

If the deck runs out before one animal receives 6 votes, the game ends with nobody becoming King. In this case, the 3 animals who received the most votes are used for scoring, with animals higher on the chart beating lower ones on ties. Because no animal is chosen as King, none of them is worth double points in this case.

Relationships to Other Games

King of the Beasts is a pretty standard Reiner Knizia bidding game. He's done a number of them. In each of these games you simultaneously increase or decrease the values of various items while making bids on them. Other, similar games include Loco! (2003) , Gold Digger (2002), and Titan: The Arena (1997). King of the Beasts lies on the simpler side of this spectrum of bidding games. Its one distinguishing factor is that you use the same elements (playing cards) for both your bids and your value changes, and thus you constantly have to trade off between increasing your stake or the value of one of your critters.

King of the Beasts: Mythological Edition was originally advertised as simply King of the Beasts, which featured cartoony animals (like lions) fighting for rulership. As far as I can tell that other edition was never released.

Besides the obvious bidding systems, King of the Beasts also includes a simple card drafting system, similar to that found in King's Breakfast (2003) wherein you take all of a certain type of card as well as de facto set collection elements since you're ultimately rewarded for efficiently gathering and playing sets of the same type of card.

The Game Design

King of the Beasts is a very simple, filler-level game.

It has two main decision matrices: what to draft and what to meld. Neither one of these decision sets is too terribly deep, but there is a little opportunity for strategy in each. When drafting you can claim cards that will help yourself or else take cards which an opponent might use to increase the value of a critter that you're not invested in. When playing you can choose to either play cards gradually, to encourage other players to jump on your bandwagon, or else you can try and save up for a master stroke at the end, possibly putting a critter out by playing a large set of 6 cards.

Of the three King of the Beasts games I played, one of them ended in a stalemate, with no King of the Beasts. That was somewhat unsatisfying, but it didn't occur in either our second or third games, each of which pleased me with its level of strategy (for the short time).

King of the Beasts isn't a particularly innovative game, nor is the strategy particularly deep. However it plays quickly and smoothly, and does allow some intelligent play given its short time frame. I suspect this game is mainly aimed at families and casual play, and it'll work fine for these. I've given it a "3" out of "5" for Substance: average.

Conclusion

King of the Beasts: Mythological Edition is a Reiner Knizia bidding game, in the same mold as other light offerings like Loco! and Gold Digger. The components for the game are disappointingly scant, but otherwise King of the Beasts is a fine game if you're looking for something light, casual, or for family gatherings.