How to play Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time & Review

Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time is a co-operative, tower defence board game.

Title: Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time

Year Published: 2020

Designer: Helana Hope, Sen-Foong Lim, Jessey Wright

Publisher: Lucky Duck Games

Players: 1-4

Game Time: 45-90 minutes

Set-up Time: 

Ages: ~5 minutes

Theme: Kingdom Rush

Mechanisms: Cooperative, Hand Management

How to win: Complete the scenario.

Game Description

Welcome to Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time, where you and your allies must work together to fend off the furious onslaught of the mysterious Time Mage. Command Heroes and build Towers to defend the realm by placing polyomino pieces to attack your enemies and deploying soldiers to hold back the ever-advancing horde. Be careful, though! The Time Mage’s portals are wreaking havoc, causing all of the Towers to warp in and out of existence! Will you play your Towers to defend the Kingdom, or will you pass them to your compatriots so that the Towers can be upgraded? The decision is yours!

How to play Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time

This is a quick and concise how to play video for Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time with the changes to the game when played solo added on at the end.

Theme

The theme obviously existed in video game form before this board game came along. I like Tower Defence games but I don’t really care about the themes. I don’t need to know why I’m doing it, I just it.

Here we have magic and heroes and bosses and they’re all crazy and colourful and I’m sure they have an interesting back story and lore. But for me, I just want to clear the level and move on to the next one.

Setup & Rulebook

Setup is fine but fiddley. You have to set up the board, get all the bits, set up the decks etc. Each scenario not only has a different map but also different little bits and bobs of setup and rules that slow the process down.

The rulebook is very clear with lots of examples. But there are some issues with examples and rules hidden away in little side boxes that should be more prominent.

Components & Artwork

The minis are nice and the bright, vibrant artwork reflects the video game very well.

The only thing I don’t like is the box even though the individual boxes for the player components are very nice. I have purchased the box that holds the base game and the expansions all in one so I’m looking forward to that when it arrives.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

Having only had this game in lockdown at the time of writing, I have only played it solo so I’ll update this bit when/if I teach it.

But, it is an open information co-op so teaching should be quite straight forward.

Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time Summary

Tower defence board games are not new. Bad Bones is one of my favourites which is also playable solo but that game is better player vs player. You also control a hero and your towers in a similar way to Kingdom Rush.

But this game does a very good job of replicating the mobile game, in some ways. It has the look of the mobile game as well as all the lore and characters etc Plenty of familiar faces…

Moving a hero around and attacking with them and using their special abilities works really well. Soldier towers causing a minor hindrance and slowing down towers is also in there too. Other bits and bobs including the difficulty level and scenario play carry over from the digital game too.

Video Game to Board Game

But, it’s difficult to replicate a video game exactly in board game form. Here you get the towers back every round and rebuild them which doesn’t make much sense. Bad Bones forces you to return damaged buildings if you don’t want to lose them permanently which is a good way to do it.

A big issue you have is that enemies move one space at a time rather than step by step digitally so you have to recreate that with large portions of damage. It means some towers lose something compared to the video game. They lose their personality, they’re all so similar to each other.

There are parts of the game done well in their own way. Instead of being a game of placing towers to strategically deal damage, you’re playing a puzzle game. What do you need to play to cover the symbols I need to cover? Which hoards can you give up on and let through? Can you afford to pass any towers to upgrade them? What do you need to do to save the Kingdom?

Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time Round-Up

More a puzzle than a fun ‘game’ but still fun to play if that makes sense? 😀

Rating

A fun tower defence game that is a nice puzzle to figure out.

I give it 6/10