Travelling and playing this little gem in the hotel lobby. Such a marvellous game for many reasons.
Been on the road the last couple of weeks and picked up this little gem at the Orc’s Nest in London.
Kingdom Legacy is a pack of about 140 cards. You start your kingdom with a small set of cards and add a couple of cards at the end of every round. Initial rounds are quick, and later rounds much longer as the kingdom deck grows in size. Most cards generate resources, and you use these resources each turn to choose which cards to rotate, flip and upgrade in your kingdom.
You get to muck around with the first 20 cards (which can be easily reset) until you’re happy you have a good handle on the rules. From that point onwards you start to discover more unique cards and events that lead to permanent alteration and destruction of cards in your deck as your kingdom evolves.
There’s no point trying to preserve the deck for a re-run – I tried. As soon as I stopped fighting and embraced the concept of an actual legacy game, I just kind of fell in love with the whole thing. Every turn you are forced to make irreversible decisions with incomplete knowledge via a sticker here and the stroke of a pen there. The agony!
It’s a lot of fun to see your altered cards turn up in the next round and imagine how your little kingdom is changing over the years; new lands and buildings, the arrival of a stranger, bandits, inventions, disasters and more.
When you’ve journeyed through (nearly) all the cards in the deck, the game ends and you calculate a score for your kingdom and write it on the side of the box. You can compare that score to others online to see how you fared.
I stopped trying to finesse a high score early on and just went with whatever mysterious narrative presented itself in the cards. That said, I do like puzzly games. If I was in a different mood when I embarked on the journey I might well have focused on scoring objectives and played for victory points.
I suspect that Kingdom Legacy would play equally well for both narrative day-dreamers and more hard-core puzzle solvers – a rare convergence.
The royal heir and her torture devices perished in the great flood.
So what can you do with your completed kingdom? Play an expansion!
The core box comes with three mini post-game scenarios. You choose an expansion, cull some cards and play 4 more rounds with your unique kingdom, working through a little thematic challenge such as a war, trade or rebellion. 10 expansions in total are planned; three mini’s in the box and two expansions already on sale – though the latter seem impossible to get hold of at the moment.
Kingdom Legacy is an ideal travel game; all you need is the deck box, a pen and an airplane table. Plus you can pack up and store a game at the end of any round by popping the cards back in the box.
Pretty sure I’ll be buying some expansions to see how the denizens of my kingdom fare. And ponying up for an extra kingdom box as I’m itching to try another complete play-through to see just how different a new kingdom might be.
