In Lords of Xidit you wander around Xidit…

…while wondering how to pronounce it!

The Black Southern Host has arisen, corrupting the hearts of the indigenous creatures. Afflicted by a mysterious sickness, they are attacking human cities. The last remaining hope for restoring peace to Xidit lies with the Kingdom’s noble heirs, the Idrakys. As one of them, you must roam the Kingdom recruiting brave soldiers and reclaiming threatened cities. Your bravery will not go unrewarded: accumulate wealth, send bards to sing your praises, and build Sorcerers’ Guilds!

Lords of Xidit is a programming game with an interesting scoring system.

You pre-program 6 actions and then, in turn order, activate action 1. When everyone has done that you activate action 2 etc until all 6 have been completed for each player.

Actions

The actions are simple. The Red, Blue and Black lines are movements, you HAVE to move down that colour line if you pick it.

The Yellow cross is used to pass on that action… although it does nothing there are tactical reasons why you might do this.

The activate action has two uses. In a city it lets you recruit guys and put them behind your screen. You have to take the lowest ranked guy in that town which is why you may delay things to let someone snap up a Peasant to let you take an Archer.

These units have a use…

The other tile you can land on is a threat which lets you trade in certain guys you have recruited for a reward.

Rewards

There are 3 rewards you can pick: Gold, Bard Tokens and Sorcerers Guilds.

Gold is Gold, you hide it behind your screen with your units.

Bard Tokens are placed in regions as a kind of pseudo-area control type thing. You score points for having the most and second most in each region.

Sorcerers Guilds are these cool-looking plastic towers that stack up, again in a region.

All of these relate to end-game scoring…

End Game Scoring

Each of the three rewards has a token and these are randomly laid out before the game begins.

In our game (pictured above) Gold was the first of the three end-game scoring bits to take place. In a 5 player game, 2 players are eliminated at this stage so you need to make sure you have enough Gold to survive this round, but you don’t need to have the most.

Next was Sorcerers Towers, the player with the fewest was eliminated leaving the two players to fight out who has the most bard points to win the game.

Lords of Xidit Summary

This “I don’t need the most, I just need more than you” part of the game is really the best bit.

Also, it looks really nice.

But, it’s quite bland… you just move, pick up and trade-in.

I want to play Lords of Xidit again but if nothing changes this won’t be part of my collection for long.

Jesta ThaRogue