For Crown And Kingdom

For Crown & Kingdom
Rio Grande Games

About the game

The king lies weakened on his deathbed.  His Majesty has but days to live, and has failed to produce an heir.  Any of the local barons could be next in line, as long as they are able to gain the approval of the people.  Each has set off on a heroic campaign around the kingdom. They vie for fame, for glory, and for the crown!

Our Thoughts

When we received the game Crown & Kingdom, we didn't know what the goal of the game was as this was a new release on the market. However by reading the instructions we discovered that the goal is to have your team of specialized emissaries to travel the kingdom, raise funds, obstruct opponents, and gain support of the people in order to become the new monarch.

For let me talk about the components of this game. First, you will see that there are six region tiles which are double-sided. I will explain later on how you can set up the tiles depending of the number of players. Second, you will obtain 20 character discs which you have to setup by placing the male sticker on one side and the female sticker on the other side. This will allow the players to either choose to play with the male or female side of each character. Also included in the box are four reference cards Finally, you will find two type of tokens - support and coins.

As I mentioned above, the regions can be placed differently depending of the number of players. On side of a region will consist of a large pie shape while the other side will display two smaller pie shapes. Here's how you can set up the game when you consider the number of players.

2 players = 6 large regions
3 players = 3 large regions, 6 small regions (The pattern of larger and smaller regions does not matter.)
4 players = 12 small regions

A fun way to start the game is the first player to make a trumpet sound and announce himself/ herself as the starting player is the one to go first. I love it when there is originality like this in games.

Essentially there are three steps each player will have to do: purchase a bride (which is optional and varies between 1 to 4 coins), move a character, and use that character's ability. You will have five character discs in all: duke/duchess, merchant, thief, knight, and scholar. The duke/duchess adds support tokens to regions. The merchant earn coins. The thief steals coins from other players. The knight remove opponent's characters from the kingdom. The scholar's ability depends on its current region where you use the action written on the region.

I am very impressed with the thickness and the quality of the map pieces and the tokens.   The tokens itself are easy to manipulate during the game.   But the part that really impress me is the character discs as these are made of wood and are very smooth to the touch.  I would suggest that when you open you box you take the time to read the instruction for the character discs.   If you are not careful you could make an error while placing the stickers on the wood discs.   Make sure that you are using both the correct male and female stickers for each character.   I really like the idea that you can choose to be a male or female for the characters as this gives you more flexibility in what you want to play.    I also like the different way we can set up the game depending on how many players you have.   And the fact that you can set up in various ways – particularly with 3 players is interesting as you can have numerous possibilities.

The only negative point I would like to mention is that I wish the player reference cards would be made of ticker material like the tiles and tokens.  This would allow you to protect them against bending and tear.   My other little disappointment would be that this game is geared for two t four players.   I wish that creators of games would offer more possibilities for bigger families sometimes.  Most board games we find on the market have a limit of five players which is not the best for a family of six.  Sometimes you can get an expansion that would allow you to play with six people but not all games offer this.  On another hand, I guess we could play in teams but it beats the purpose of the competition sometimes.   

The game can be played between two to four players.  One game could last from 30 to 60 minutes long depending of the number of players.  

For Crown & Kingdom is available for purchase at amazon.ca and amazon.com.

  

Disclaimer: Thanks to Rio Grande Games for sending me the above mentioned product for review purposes . I was not monetarily compensated for this review. Please note that the review was not influenced by the Sponsor in any way. All opinions expressed here are only my own.