Players: 3-6
Playing Time: 20-30 minues
Difficulty: 1 (of 10)
The Components
King Me! comes with a variety of components:
- 1 board
- 6 scoring markers
- 13 candidates
- 18 vote cards
- 26 secret goal cards
- 1 rulebook
The Board: A solid board printed in full color on heavy, textured cardboard. It depicts the 6 levels of King Vladimiro's Castle, labelled "0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", and "10". It's done in very stylized artwork that I find pleasing to the eye. A score track runs along the edge of the board.
Scoring Markers: These are small wooden cubes in 6 different colors for the six players. Each one fits just about exactly into one of the scoring track spaces. Here's where I started running into problems with the aesthetics of the components, because I kept knocking the pieces out of the scoring track. I thought I was just being a klutz, and that it was my own fault, but I've since heard other players express the same concern.
The Candidates: These are textured card pieces that stand up on a hard plastic stand. There's one for most of the letters of the alphabet from "A" to "P". Both sides of the figure feature a prominent color (e.g., light blue for "E"rnesto). One side displays a large letter with the name, while the other displays a figure, and below it a much smaller name.
These were the most troublesome component to use during play. They're vitally important, because these characters form the basis of your victory. Unfortunately because they're two sided, the inforrmation on each candidate is only available from two sides of the table at once. Worse, because the figures tend to be arrayed in rows of up to four characters, you tend to only be able to see the first character in each row without a bunch of head craning.
On our second game we took all these characters off of their plastic stands and laid them flat on the board to make them easier to see. It was still somewhat subpar because the board levels aren't quite big enough for the characters to be laid out in this orientation.
The Cards: The vote cards either show a crown ("Yes") or a crossed-out crown ("No"). The yes votes are color-coded to the players so they can be retrieved, while the no votes are not.
The secret goal cards provide a list of characters that a player is trying to move toward victory. Each list of six characters is color coded to the 6 characters and also clearly displays the name of each character with the first letter quite prominent.
All of the cards are of the smaller European game size, with rounded corners, printed on decent though not thick cardstock. The two card types have slightly different shading on the backs. You can tell them apart, but more differential would have been nice.
Rulebook: The rulebook is quite large, but only because it's printed in a number of different languages. The actual rules for the game are just 3 pages long. They're clearly explained and have lots of illos in full-color.
Box & Tray: The box is fairly badly oversized for the components. I'd guess 75-90% of the box is just empty space. This is a real shame; the game is light filler fare, but the box is big enough that folks will be less likely to haul it around. There isn't really a tray in the box, though a tiny Ziplock is helpfully included for the cards and wooden pieces.
The pieces in King Me! are quite nicely manufactured. Unfortunately, due to the problems with the scoring track and the much more serious issues with the character figures, I'd have to say that King Me! ends up being one of those games where the components actually work against the play of the game. Combined with the relatively high price point, I can thus only give King Me! an average Style rating of "3" out of "5".
The Game Play
Starting the Round: You start off a round of King Me! when you receive a secret goal card that lists 6 of the 13 characters. During the round you must try and raise those 6 characters to maximum position in the castle--without getting them killed.
After everyone has received their secret goals, all of the characters are placed in the castle by the characters; each player put a character into the castle in turn. Depending on the number of players each player will place 2-4 characters. They must be placed on levels 1, 2, 3, or 4 (not 0, 5, or 10). A maximum of four characters may be placed on a level. At the end all extra characters are placed down in level 0.
Moving Characters: Regular play now begins. Each turn a player moves one character up one level, with the restriction that no move may lead to more than 4 characters being on a level. Characters may never be moved back down.
Electing a King: If a character is moved up to the "10" level (the throne room) from the "5" level (the Nobles' level) a vote for king is immediately taken. Each player will have 1 Yes vote and between 2 and 4 No votes, depending on the number of players in the game.
Each player chooses one of his vote cards and plays it. When all cards have been played , they're all revealed. If there's even one No vote, the would-be ruler is beheaded! He's removed from the board. After a non-successful vote, players get back their Yes votes, but not their No votes.
If all the votes are Yes, the character is made monarch and the current round of play ends.
Ending a Round: When a king is elected the current round is ended. Each player reveals his secret goal card and earns a number of points equal to the castle level for each of his six characters: 0 for characters who have been beheaded, 10 for the king, 5 for the next level down, then 4, etc.
As a note, the third round is special: if all 6 of your characters are eliminated, you instead earn 33 points.
If there are still additional rounds to be played, each player now gets back all his No vote cards and randomly chooses a new secret goal card.
Ending the Game: The game ends after 3 rounds of play. The player with the most points after that third round wins.
The Game Design
King Me! is a light game, appropriate for parties or fillers. As such, it's acceptable for it to have a higher level of randomness and a general lack of strategy. Still, I didn't like the following designs:
Randomness Implicit in Votes: It's entirely possible in the voting phase for every player to vote Yes on a candidate due to assumptions that someone else will vote No--and thus for a round to end very quickly. To a certain extent you can say this is a danger people face when they bluff, but I feel that a very quick ending can be quite detrimental to the game.
Bluffing Simplistic: The bluffing that is the core of the game felt simplistic to me. Your basic choices tend to be to move a character important to you up, to move a character not important to you up, to move a character important to you to the throne, and to move a character not important to you to the throne. There is some strategy possible in all of this, but it felt fairly one dimensional.
Wide Span of Victory Conditions Troublesome: The fact that you gained victory from a full 6 of the 13 characters was troublesome on a couple of different levels. First, it badly impacted the bluffing core, because it made it much harder to figure out what characters another player owned (because they were making moves for 6 different characters) and also made learning about a single character much less important if you did manage to do that sleuthing work. Second, the wide span of victory conditions was part of the cause of the voting randomness alluded to above, since a full half of the players might be interested in any candidate. Third, it conflated the player victory points so they all tended to clump together, and thus ultimately give players less control of their destinies.
On the positive side I'd say that King Me! is indeed quick and easy to play. It can be very different to play with different levels of players, increasing replayability. However, despite that, I just didn't feel any spark from this game. I felt like the game's core mechanic of bluffing wasn't explored in any innovative or exciting ways, and that if anything the game mechanics discouraged its use.
Thus I give King Me! an average "3" out of "5" Substance: not flawed, not exciting.
Conclusion
Overall, King Me! is a light game that doesn't do much for me. I think there are better bluffing games, including Leo Colvini's Clans and better quick filler games, including Reiner Knizia's High Society!.
If you're a particular fan of party games and bluffing games, you might still want to give this game a gander--I've seen more than a couple reviews from people who love it. However, if those two categories don't immediately track with you, I'd suggest trying something else.
