The Old King’s Crown Board Game Review

It took Pablo Clark five years to design, refine and illustrate The Old King's Crown, his very first board game. During this time, rumors began to grow among testers and convention goers that this game, in which players take on the roles of asymmetrical factions vying for power in a fantasy kingdom, was something special. Something, of course, was better than we had any right to expect from a novice designer. Now, after self-publishing Kickstarter run, it's finally here and we can explore Clark's kingdom in all its glory.

What's in the box

It's impossible to discuss The Old King's Crown without first talking about the art. After all, it's right here on the top of the box and it's amazing. Rich in color and detail, stylized yet recognizable, bringing to life with magnificent precision a world that never existed. The fact that the designer is also an artist just makes you wonder how he ended up at the front of the queue when talent was being handed out.

Even when you lift the lid of this luxurious box, there is artwork everywhere inside, almost every painting adding to the story and setting. It is on a board that is a window in a high tower overlooking the provinces of a kingdom engulfed in civil war, as if the players are plotting in their fortresses while the people suffer. It sits in a tarot-sized deck of cards for each faction, and fills in the wide narrative gaps in the summary given to the setting in the rulebook. It is found on all kingdom maps and is a faction-neutral buff available to players. And this is all amazing: every time you play, you will notice something new.

Old King's Crown

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The entire graphic design and quality of the components here is luxurious and mesmerizing. The layout of the rule book with graphic examples, the way the board carefully guides you through the steps of each turn, the nice color and placement of each faction markers and the embossed central field with pockets for storing cards and solid wood pieces with a pattern in a matching color. The remaining few common items: the turn marker, encounter order markers, and a few other small items are made of simple black and gold wood.

When assembled, it takes up a huge portion of the table, but it looks incredible: an invitation made of wood and cardboard to stop and look, a whole world broken into squares and circles for those who take the time to look and appreciate.

Rules and how it happens

It's a fairly complex game, but the difficulty comes from the sheer density of information available rather than from the core gameplay, which is relatively simple. Games last a fixed number of turns, usually five, and each turn is divided into four seasons. The bulk of the action takes place in the summer, when players will battle it out across three locations, each with two possible rewards chosen by the winner. First, in turn order, players place their herald in one of the winning spaces, which will earn them bonus points if they win there. They can then place some of their small number of followers in a specific location, which provides a small combat bonus. Then it's time for a card game.

All players start with functionally identical decks of cards from which they draw a hand of six. Everyone places a card face down next to each location. They are then decided one at a time, each turning over a card and adding the number on that card to the number of supporter pieces on it. The largest amount of winnings. But very often this is not the case.

The reason for this is that many maps have action icons that can be triggered to make things more difficult. For example, Ambush allows the owner to play a second card in melee. Flanking this card will slip out of the current battle into a future one. There are others, but the scariest of them all is “Deadly”, which occurs after all other actions and kills the opponent's cards, putting them out of play in the dreaded “lost pile” for the rest of the game unless they have a helmet or shield icon, the latter of which also keeps them in the battle for that location.

It's hard to overstate how tight this is. Someone turns over the cards, and everyone simultaneously cranes their heads over the massive board, desperately trying to decipher the game's complex set of symbols to figure out who is in the dispute and what the next steps might be. Fights that are decided by an ambush, or ties that are broken by extra card play, further heighten the excitement, as do death attacks that can permanently place critical cards in the lost pile. And when it comes to heralds, the stakes are off the charts.

All locations that you influence are called victory points. But if you win in the area where you placed your herald, you will receive an extra point. And if you win in the space where you and the others have placed your heralds, you can take away a victory point from each of these unfortunate souls. In this game, the winning score can be 15-20 points, so actually taking points away from other people to add to your own is a big deal. Well-timed herald placement can take you from last place to first in one fell swoop, ensuring everyone is in the fight until the very end.

Naturally, this entails all sorts of intrigue. Discard piles are public information, so you can dig through someone else's trash, checking to see if they've played that deadly card or if it's still lurking in their hand to trick you. Players can also purchase additional cards to add to their deck, which not only come from asymmetrical stacks tailored to your faction, but can also add even more wrinkles to the formula, such as making the smallest card win instead. You'll need to pay incredibly close attention to what everyone else is doing if you want to minimize the likelihood of unpleasant surprises.

Buying new cards is just one way to show the asymmetry of the game. Each faction has a set of four special one-time abilities, plus a fifth that you can use if you win a certain location. All of them are unique and roughly correspond to the thematic playstyle of this faction. The Gathering, which represents the cult state religion, can swap two cards in combat or sacrifice cards to the lost pile to gain resources to purchase more cards. Rebellion, on the other hand, which represents a revolution by the common people of a state, can give cards a death effect or a retreat effect.

When you start combining different unique card effects, asymmetries, special abilities, and location victory effects, you start to see all sorts of ways to influence not just individual encounters, but the state of the game as a whole. Your hand size will decrease as the game progresses, except that you can prevent this from happening. You will lose supporters if you don't find a way to win them back. If you buy enough new cards, you'll get a point bonus, but you'll have to make big sacrifices to do so. The number of ways you can get close to The Old King's Crown and still win is amazing, almost overwhelming in its cycles within cycles within cycles.

And that's not all! We've only really looked at the summer turn so far. In the spring, players use cards to bid on a selection of kingdom cards, most of which are game breakers on their own. They can allow you to trade cards you drew for one from a lost pile, steal another player's special abilities, or give your cards additional effects. It's easy enough to build a strategy around each of them, but you can hold up to two of them. Except that after the initial bid, you can steal kingdom cards from other players instead of taking a new one, forcing them and you to reschedule on the fly.

In the fall, you can send the cards on a journey, which will give you the opportunity to buy more cards, or you can send them to the council, where they will stay and provide long-term special abilities. This could mean potentially more points if you win with your herald, a chance to bring back supporters, or other effects. After all, winter is just a phase of accounting and, frankly, a chance to catch your breath after the absolute. strategic and the social madness of the entire round of The Old King's Crown.

This is not an exaggeration. While there is a staggering amount of fun to be had here, the amount of detail you need to take into account to maximize your chances is almost overwhelming. You have to be aware of your special abilities and special cards, as well as everyone else: what they're buying, what they're playing, what's in their discard pile or lost pile. You need to know each player's kingdom cards, what they do, and what you need to do to steal them or protect your own. At first it seems impossible. It will get easier with practice, but you will have to play this game an incredible amount if you want to get the hang of it properly.

However, you don't have to do all of this to win. It's perfectly fine to play more from the hip, although a lot of the details will bother your thought processes. And you can get away with it because, essentially, you can check every discard pile in the game and still not be sure whether the player just threw their death card into the herald's location or whether it's a cunning bluff. You can learn very well just by reading faces, voices and body language. And this creates a strange tension at the heart of The Old King's Crown: this is a game that gives you incredible range and strategy, and then allows other players to pull the rug out from under you with cunning bluffs.

Where to buy