Fall of the Mountain King has players defend their land against evil invading Gnomes.

But you get to Troll them.

The gnome attack was sudden and relentless. They swarmed our tunnels, defiling our mountain home and driving us from our ancestral caverns. Trolls from every clan rushed to the heart of the mountain to defend our Great Halls. We’ve lost track of how long we’ve been beating back the endless waves of invaders. Soon, it will be time for a final stand. Will we rise up like champions, or be driven out to the wilderness to fight for survival? Sharpen your blades, brothers and sisters! Raise your hammers! If we trolls must fall, we’ll fall fighting like kings!

Fall of the Mountain King Game Overview

Quick Rules Summary

Players will draft cards to add to an area where those cards are overlapped. The cards show the symbols of the various actions you can take in the game.

To take them, you add tokens to the symbol of the action you want to take and all orthogonally adjacent symbols to make the action stronger.

The main actions allow you to get trolls onto the board and move them around to adjacent caverns. This is to gain control of them or to move in to fight Gnomes.

You can also add influence to a champion in the hope they’ll join your side at the end of a round.

At the end of a round, Gnomes invade and will kill trolls if they move into their space, awarding points to the troll owner.

Then players score for control of each area of the board.

How do you win?

After 3 waves, the player with the most points (which is Honour) wins.

Main Mechanisms

There is a bit of card drafting and pattern building as you build out your action selection thing.

The other main part is the area control/influence across the regions on the board.

USP

The theme is fairly unique with Trolls as the ‘goodies’ and Gnomes as the ‘baddies’. Typically this is the other way around and the trolls in this game are still the scary type. The gnomes look darker and creepier.

The action selection mechanism is a new one to me, it does remind me a bit of Honshu.

Theme

The flipped theme is fine and being on the end of a losing battle rather than eventually overcoming them is very good.

Setup

Looked fiddley to me. There are bits and cards and tokens and stuff all over the place.

Components & Artwork

The components for the deluxe edition I played are really nice with its adorable minis.

I’m not sure I would be happy with the wooden meeples and cardboard tokens of the basic version. The art style isn’t for me.

Ease of Teaching

From a player’s perspective, it’s fairly easy to understand. How to take the different actions and what they do are pretty straightforward.

Trying to get across to beginner players about how Gnomes invade and which route they take? not so much.

Similar Games

I mean, any dudes on a map game really. My favourite at the moment is Monumental but I would also add El Grande into the mix for the area control aspect.

Fall of the Mountain King Review

Positives

It looks really pretty, well the deluxe edition does.

The way you build out your actions means you can try and cater to your strategy for that game.

The action selection is limiting but not to the point that it’s frustrating.

Negatives

The Gnome invasion is clunky.

There are many games that do a similar thing better for me.

Fall of the Mountain King Summary

A decent game that has a lot of competition.

Jesta ThaRogue