Kingsburg (+ To Forge a Realm) First Impressions

Kingsburg is a dice rolling, worker placement, city building and fending off attacks, sounds familiar.

This game was fun, and it has a Jester which all games should have.

In Kingsburg, players are Lords sent from the King to administer frontier territories.

The game takes place over five years, a total of 20 turns. In every year, there are 3 production seasons for collecting resources, building structures, and training troops. Every fourth turn is the winter, in which all the players must fight an invading army. Each player must face the invaders, so this is not a cooperative game.

The resources to build structures and train troops are collected by influencing the advisers in the King’s Council. Players place their influence dice on members of the Council. The player with the lowest influence dice sum will be the first one to choose where to spend his/her influence; this acts as a way of balancing poor dice rolling. Even with a very unlucky roll, a clever player can still come out from the Council with a good number of resources and/or soldiers.

Each adviser on the King’s Council will award different resources or allocate soldiers, victory points, and other advantages to the player who was able to influence him/her for the current turn.

At the end of five years, the player who best developed his assigned territory and most pleased the King through the Council is the winner.

Many alternate strategies are possible to win: will you go for the military way, disregarding economic and prestige buildings, or will you aim to complete the big Cathedral to please the King? Will you use the Merchant’s Guild to gain more influence in the Council, or will you go for balanced development?

Game Play

The gameplay is simple. The board is made up of numbers from 1 to 18 each giving you different stuff.

You roll 3 dice add up the total and the player with the lowest total goes first.

You then split your dice up any way you like and put them on the number on the board you like. In the pic above, I was Red. I rolled 10 (6+2+3). I needed gold so I used my 6+2 to use the 8 square which gives two gold. Fortunately, I also needed one wood so I used my 3 to go number 3 to get a block of wood.

Once I placed my 8 it goes around the table clockwise, each player playing dice onto one square. You can’t play onto an already occupied square so if one of those players had played on the 3, as it was my only dice I would be unable to go anywhere else.

With all this Gold and Wood and Stone you build buildings on a little player mat you keep in front of you. They give you bonuses and victory points and pluses to your attack score.

In winter you get attacked and you need to defeat the monster or lose resources or even a building!

I enjoyed it, apparently, it’s much better with the expansion but as long as it has the Jester I’ll be happy to play it again 🙂

Kingsburg Update 22/05/2018

I’ve played it with the expansion since and yes, it’s much better.

The round of combat is played with tokens rather than a die. But once a token is used it’s used so you know what’s been and what’s yet to come.

You also get different buildings on your player board, I think… It’s been a while 🙂

Jesta ThaRogue