Daniel (@dungeondive) delivers his verdict after the wobbly playthrough, and it’s a study in admiring a game without loving it. City of Kings, he says, is undeniably very good: elegantly designed mechanisms, gorgeous art, and — rare for Kickstarter — a genuinely excellent, well-proofread rulebook that won’t need a corrective second edition. The components are top-notch, the game elegant rather than fiddly. And yet he’s already sold his copy. The reason is a theme-mechanism disconnect he can’t get past: each enemy card carries a vivid paragraph of flavour text — where they’re from, how they fight, what they wield — but in play they’re reduced to a stat bar and abilities drawn at random from a bag, so the poison-blighted horde you just read about attacks with lightning and flame walls instead. He’d trade some of that randomness for bespoke encounters where a poison clan always brings poison. Placing himself firmly on the Ameritrash end of the spectrum, he groups City of Kings with Mage Knight and Gloomhaven as mechanically sound but “puzzly” — games where he feels like a man solving a puzzle at a table rather than a hero on a grand adventure. A great game, he predicts, for most people; just not for him.
Daniel admires City of Kings but sold it — a “puzzly” euro rather than the grand adventure he craves. Have you ever recognised a game as genuinely excellent and still known it wasn’t for you?