During a frenzy of backing Kickstarters, I came across Era of Kingdoms (not just on Kickstarter now, see their website), a game that appealed to me initially based on aesthetics alone. It has a layout that reminded me of early settlements in The Age of Empires, or similar village building games. Also, the initial buy-in of $30 for the base game plus all of the stretch goals was an easy sell.
Some specifics about the game:
- 1-4 players
- Approx 45 min a game
- 2 mini expansions included that introduce variant play styles (drafting mechanic and ruler traits)
Each player starts out with a board that has 12 spaces for cards: 1 for the town hall/castle, 8 for land, and 3 for people cards (card that represent villagers, lords, knights, and other people living in your kingdom). Land and people cards give the standard medieval themed resources: population, metal, wood, and food. Once a resource is played they exist continually for the player. This means that instead of obtaining and spending a number of tokens representing those resources (think Yokohama) the resources are always available. Once you have one wood and one population resource on your board, you can then play as many cards as you have actions that cost one wood and one population. The limiting factor becomes the available actions. Each player has three actions a turn, variable by helpful event cards such as the Oracle.
The goal of the game is to amass victory points. The higher the levels of cards a player places on their board, the more likely they are to have the most victory points. Cards are split into three tiers: Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced. Correspondingly, the higher the tier of card, the more expensive it is to play. All players start by drawing from the Basic deck. As the game progresses, the board’s center square can be upgraded to a town center, and then a castle, allowing players access to the Intermediate and Advanced deck, respectively. Land cards can be upgraded as well. Basic cards are your starting options with higher level cards providing more resources and victory points. Lands can also be swapped out if a more advantageous card becomes available.
What I personally enjoyed about Era of Kingdoms is that it is not, strictly speaking, a player vs player game. Although it is competitive and you can saddle your opponents with plagues and raid their kingdom for riches, these things don’t happen so frequently that it feels like those avenues are the main path to victory. Granted, when they do occur it can suck, but the game will not be won on raids alone.
Most of the gameplay, at least for my group, was centered on building your own kingdom and, with the blind draw, trying to luck your way to victory. The ability to discard most of all of your hand a turn and draw back up to five cards means at least we were able to cycle through hands and options quickly, keeping the game moving and from feeling stagnant. In the future I’d like to try the mini expansions, especially the drafting expansion, to take some of the guesswork and luck out of the draw mechanic.
Another nice part of the game is how compactly it is boxed. The box itself is the typical width and length of many of my other games. It fits well with Clank!, Tokaido, and Blueshift in terms of footprint, but is half the height.
This would be a good game for groups that like mild tableau building, card drawing, and medieval aesthetics. While a competitive game, it is not required to always attack or hinder your opponents to achieve victory. The rules are smooth, easy to learn, but with several options to win there is good replay value.
Ross Blythe is a Chicago based gamer interested in all things tabletop. He enjoys reading history as well as fiction, and so has a soft spot for historical wargames like Pike & Shotte. For the campaigns he runs as a DM he often looks to history for inspiration, for the lessons of the past to challenge the players at his table.
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