Kingdoms comes with a small set of simple components:

• 1 board in 4 jigsaw pieces
• 40 castles
• 22 land tiles
• many gold coin counters
• 1 epoch counter

Board: The jigsaw board is a solid piece of cardboard split into 4 pieces that easily click together. It depicts a simple, totally abstract 5x6 grid. It's full color, though mostly green.

Cardboard Counters: The rest of the pieces are all done in a similarly thick and colorful cardboard. The three main counter types are all easily distinguishable: the castle are octagonal, the tiles are square, and the coins are circular.

Castles. The castles are very nicely color coded red, green, blue, and yellow to show which player they belong to; easy-to-read dots denote the power of each castle (1-4).

Land. The land tiles depict a variety of nice artwork. For the resource and hazard tiles, their value (+6 to -6) is clearly shown and very easy to read.

Coins. The coins are printed in a variety of sizes and simple colors to make it very easy to see the difference between, e.g., a 1 gold and a 100 gold coin. There are unfortunately not really enough coins to play a 4-player game easily; constant changing of coins is required, and in a very high scoring game you can run out of the top denominations.

Box & Tray: The box that Kingdoms is printed in unfortunately doesn't have any sort of useful tray; in fact the standard Fantasy Flight box tray that is used for this box size is just the wrong size for the map pieces (which are slightly wider than the tray inset). Fortunately, tossing away the tray and placing the various cardboard pieces in Ziplock baggies resolves much of the problem.

Overall, the components for Kingdoms are of average quality, pleasing to the eye, and make the game simple to play. They thus earn a high "3" out of "5" for Style: slightly above average.

In Kingdoms you place land tiles and castles on the board in order to create Medieval kingdoms. The game is won by placing the largest castles in the regions (rows & columns) which have the richest resources and least hazards.

Setup: The game starts out with the abstract 5x6 board empty. Each player has up to 10 castles in their hand, each one denoted by a rank. These will include 1 rank 4 castle, 2 rank 3 castles, 3 rank 2 castles, and between 2 and 4 rank 1 castles (depending on the number of players in the game).

Each player will also have one "secret" land tile in his hand. These land tiles will form the core of the kingdoms in this game. There are three types of land tiles: resource tiles, hazard tiles, and special tiles.

Resource tiles depict rich lands. Each has a value between +1 and +6. There are 12 total.

Hazard tiles depict dangerous lands. Each has a value between -1 and -6. There are 6 total.

Special tiles have particular effects on scoring. There are 4 special tiles total: 2 mountains, 1 dragon, and 1 gold mine.

Order of Play: Starting with the first player, each player gets to play a counter to an empty space on the grid. This counter may be one of three things:

1. A castle from the player's hand.
2. The player's "secret" tile.
3. An unknown tile drawn from the deck.

How the Game Plays: Usually play starts out with players selecting tiles from the deck and playing them, forming the basic environment. Eventually one player will play a castle to try and begin reaping the rewards of the rich lands. Play will them continue with players either playing castles to reap rewards, playing deck tiles to the benefit of their own castles or the deficit of other players, or choosing to play their single secret tile when a good (or bad) tile is particularly needed.

A player must always play some counter if he can, meaning that if the deck runs out a player may be forced to play his secret tile and/or a castle even if he'd prefer not to.

Scoring the Game: Once all 30 spaces on the board are filled, scoring begins. Each row is scored separately, then each column. In short the following is done for each:

1. All of the resource tiles (+1 to +6) are added together for that row or column.
2. All of the hazard tiles (-1 to -6) for that row or column are subtracted from the resource total.
3. Each castle in that row or column then earns an amount of gold equal to the rank of the castle times the sum of the resource and the hazard tiles in the row of column.

Note that each castle will actually earn gold twice: once for its row and once for its column. Likewise, each land tile is scored twice, once for the row and once for the column.

In addition, it's quite possible for a row or column to have a negative score, in which case each castle owner in the row or column will have to pay out that amount.

The four special tiles slightly modify this scoring:

• Mountain Tiles: Each of these tiles divides its row and column into two parts for scoring purposes. The land tiles on one side of the mounains aren't counted for the castles on the other side, and vice versa.
• Dragon Tile: No resource tiles (+1 to +6) are counted for the row/column the dragon is in.
• Gold Mine Tile: All resources and hazards in its row and column have double value.

The image below shows two simple examples.

Ending an Epoch (& The Game: At the end of each epoch, each player gets back all the rank 1 castles he played. Rank 2 and better castles are returned to the game box. The board is cleared, each player is dealt a new secret tile, and a new round of play begins. After three epochs are played, the player with the most gold wins.

Game Variants

Games can be either tactical or strategic. Tactical games tend to involve minute-to-minute decisions. On an individual turn you take the action that has the best potential affect on you at that point in time. Strategic games tend to be about long-term planning. You make a decision on an individual turn with the plan for a specific payoff down the road. Most board games tend to be strategic, but Reiner Knizia in particular instead tends to offer up tactical games masquerading as strategy.

Kingdoms is one of these. The fact that you only ever know about one future tile (your secret tile) and that major changes can be wrought on the board before your next turn combine to make it very hard to look forward, thus you have to make those minute-by-minute decisions: given the tile I just drew, how can I best play it.

Some gamers will favor tactical games over strategy and vice-versa. Fortunately Kingdoms' abstraction is so clean and simple that it's very easy to make modifications to change the play of the game. Here's some simple ideas that we've come up with in our various playtest versions, going from the lowest strategy addition to the highest:

• Modified Secret Tile. Whenever you draw a tile from the deck, you may either play that tile or else play your secret tile and make your drawn card your new secret. (This gives you the opportunity to hoard particularly good or bad tiles.)
• Expanded Secret Tile. Give each player two secret tiles at the start of each epoch. (This doubles the amount of "strategic" play available to each player based on tiles in hand.)
• Dealt Out Tiles. Deal all tiles equally to all players. Place the remainder on the board, each in its own row and column. (This one, which we tried out, dramatically increased both the strategy and the cognition required in the game. Scores tended to be either much higher or much lower round to round because of the ability to put each tile to its best use, and players definitely felt more in control of the game. Personally, however, I didn't enjoy it as much as the standard gameplay.)

The simplicity of the core game allows for many other possibilities for game variants, such as all castles coming back each round, rank one castles also disappearing each round, each player starting out with a high value castle on the board, etc.

Relations to Other Games

Overall, Kingdoms plays well and quickly. Here's some of its best points:

Good Balance: Some of the best balanced games actually self-balance by giving players the ability to attack a leader. Through the use of hazard tiles and the dragon, this is quite possible in Kingdoms, but it's not so powerful that a leader is doomed.

Good Selection of Pieces: The tiles are well and carefully selected in a number of ways. First, there are 12 resource tiles (+1 to +6 twice) but only 6 hazard tiles (-1 to -6) and thus the game generally continues on an upward trend, which is always good in a board game. Second, the composition of the tiles is very simple--12 resources, 6 hazards, 2 mountains, 1 dragon, 1 gold mine--and thus it's very easy to memorize them and be aware of what's still out there.

Cooperative Gameplay Encouraged: The game does a great job of encouraging players to work together--to either build up castle values or bring down a leader--and these dynamics help to make the game more enjoyable.

Good Decision Tree: The decision tree is cleanly broken into two pieces which helps speed up the game and improves its simplicity. First, you choose one of three actions: place a castle, place your secret tile, or place a tile from the deck. Then, having made that choice, you select which location on the board your piece goes into. There can still be considerable thought required, particularly at midgame, but it would have been much greater without this two tier decision breakdown.

Here's some of the slight annoyances:

The Random Factor: What your secret tile is can have a notable affect on the game. A really good secret title has the potential to be worth 40 or 50 points through careful placement and a bad tile can totally wreck someone elses' round. Because of the aforementioned ability to take down a leader, this only really matters in the last round, but there it's a little more random than I'd like for a game that's this heavily cognitive. I've considered some alternative ways to choose secret tiles (open selection, distribution of average tiles only [+3, +4, -3, or -4], etc.), and some of these might help, but in general the current randomness isn't a game breaker either.

Scoring Slow: The scoring is relatively simple, since you have coins to keep track of it all, but it can be a bit slow and tedious. An online version might be an improvement because of a computer being able to do the scoring.

Overall Kingdoms is a fun game, with its only mild limitations being the random factor of the secret tile, and its simplicity acting as an ultimate limitor to replays. It's not too deep, but it works, and is a nice change of pace as a filler game. I've thus given it a high "3" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion