Game Night Light 9

Last night was game night. I honestly forgot all about last week's game night by the time the evening rolled around, what with my dead car that I'd been dealing with during the day.

Anyway, last night we played a simple game called Kingdoms.

It can handle four players and claims games of 20-40 minutes. We played a couple in about an hour each.

The beer exchange involved these selections:

Doritos, peanut M & Ms, and mini Reese's Cups provided the snacks.

The game itself was fun. It handles up to four players. With two players you have four 1-factor castles, three 2-factor castles, two 3-factor castles, and one 4-factor castle. With more players you get fewer castles.

You start with 50 gold and one multiplier tile held without revealing its type. They can be +6 to -5, I think. With a dragon, mine, and two mountain tiles that have special effects.

Each turn you either play your pre-game multiplier tile, draw and play a multiplier tile, or play a castle by placing one on the map.

The game goes for three rounds and each round goes until the board is filled.

You score each side by rows and columns. You add up your castle factors lined up and multiply that by the sum of the multiplier tiles.

The mountain tile splits the row or column in two for scoring calculations.

The mining card doubles the value of all multiplier tiles.

The dragon tile negates all positive value tiles.

The two games we played were fun. We each varied our play by emphasizing castles or tiles and by mixing castle value placement priorities. I'm still not sure what the right mix is on tiles versus castles, although I'm pretty sold on the value of using the lower value castles as recon rather than plopping down the good castles early to provide targets for opponents.

There was a lot of planning, defensive moves, adding to your own score, and knocking down the opponent's score. Many more opportunities for "you bastard!" than in Catan.

This might be a good candidate for bar nights some times given the small board and lack of dice.

Anyway, a successful weekly game night that wrapped up at about 9:30. Much fun!