The King's Dilemma Review - Addictive, Political Poker

[Music] all right we've got a problem and it's not that I've just had a breakdown a few weeks ago Matt and Tom reviewed a war of whispers a box of secrets and smarts and such simple rules that tucks a terrifically cunning war game into just one hour but they also hinted that a war of whispers was the ultimate game of Thrones board game and I'm sorry boys but today I'm looking at the King's dilemma like war of whispers it's not set in the game of Thrones universe but in a fantasy universe of the designers own creation and it's the actual ultimate game of Thrones board game right yes fine but let me spike a couple of facts at you this is an early candidate for my game of the year also you might know italian-designed you Ohama hack and Lorenzo Silva for their previous collaboration Railroad Inc a rollin write game that was as sharp and sweet as an injection of marmalade but now as if the pair got suckered into a drunken bet to make the exact opposite of railroad ink they have released the Kings dilemma a board game epic that tells a story spanning centuries which will take you and your friends 15 20 maybe 25 hours to finish at which point your board will be a parade of spoilers hence this censorship Fiesta I've got going on now don't worry I am of course not going to spoil anything in this review but oh boy you gotta hear about this board game the first thing that you are gonna be doing when you sit down to play the Kings dilemma is pick the noble house that you will be representing on the King's Council now there are 12 of these from salty rebels to depressed artists to a house that's basically the Lannisters with the serial numbers filed off and just like in Game of Thrones you are going to delight in watching these misfit families play political poker an individual game of the kings dilemma follows the reign of just one king in the royal bloodline who is literally just the name and does nothing if you've heard of puppet rulers the king in the case that I met could be an actual wooden puppet for all of the impact that they have on policy which is a little close to home frankly your real boss is this from start to finish a game of the Kingston EMA is nothing more than a sequence of one-shot dilemmas squirt it out from the bottom of this deck players then argue about what to do one side wins and you all suffer the consequences if you've played the reins mobile games you'll recognize this system of how your choices affect the kingdom now with the levers and the kings that I'm are very complicated involved but I'm gonna invent a fake simple one let's say the King asks you should we let the people eat cake well that's probably gonna cost the kingdom some money but it's going to fill a few bellies now if too many of these sliders go down as if your council were fading out a medieval backing track that's going to cause the King to have to abdicate causing the end of the game alternatively if you pull too many sliders up and this stability marker reaches the top that actually means that now the King's allies are too powerful and again they can force him to run away causing the end of the game or if you and your fellow councillors manage to tread water for long enough the King might just die of old age which feels like not a win for the team exactly but you know there is a kind of relief there like you've eaten a hot dog while wearing white and not got any stains on you the old banger is gone and there's no mess no disappointingly for a game that as we will soon see is otherwise as immersive and confident as the King's dilemma the play around the table who wins each reign is the one of you that got the most points and the way you do that is well it starts with players drafting one of these cards at the beginning of a game that shows what your counselor wants from that reign and where you want these sliders to be when the King dies also play a start each reign with a heaving coin personal money that is exclusively used to bribe other players around the table to do what you want because again when the King leaves the players with the most money get some points a brief note here on how voting works during how I called this game political poker well voting actually works like poker pots set with way more negotiation around the table and marginally less hurt feelings either yay or nay goes through based on how much political power was spent by that site with players trying to spook one another out of pots / dilemmas with big raises and bribes and threats and if you're my friends incredibly vague I Oh use that cause the council to collapse into infighting when used I'm sorry Annie but a piece of paper on which Chris has written I will give you something cool at some point is not redeemable in the Royal Courts we're voting on whether to execute a man Oh what you'll give me five coins - five coins okay the council recognizes the validity of this coupon you're also that much more likely to win a reign if you maintain your houses reputation and this is I mean certainly it's my favorite mechanic that I've seen all year so this part of the board I'm covering up is where players are going to put down and sign any of 175 stickers that come with this game what this that means is you get a table full of players all agreeing for some eye watering lis expensive policy because they know that you are the financially irresponsible house and will get blamed and they're going to be laughing all the way to what's left of your country's bank and you and your friends being comedic ly reprehensible is a big part of this game's charm it's so much fun to what your friends get transformed into slimy politicians and they will be transformed because these dilemmas you're voting on our ethical II quite complicated but players are mostly just thinking about sliders and points so you get stuff like players trying to justify a transparent evil law while the rest of the table boos them and booing is all they will do because they're not really going to invest their power in stopping you all players you know changing their position halfway through a speech because they misread the consequences of one of the actions yes of course we can't allow this marriage with the people to the north to go ahead because they've always been disrespectful of our way oh it's actually gonna make us money I've always been a fan of the princesses relationship with them what's this guy's name another way in which players will find themselves being the worst is in how you don't actually have to vote aye or nay on a dilemma you can instead pass permanently taking yourself out of the voting but recovering some power and some money as you cool your political jets but one thing is meant for my group was the creation of a running joke where the person leading a particular dilemma would say aye yes we must all debate whether or not this is a war crime a very important discussion that will have ramifications for our kingdom for millennia to come I look forward to a spirited debate from my fire counselors pass and there's something extra funny that comes from playing subsequent generations of counselors in one of my early games of this my friends and I argued for 15 minutes with threats and money changing hands and to see us you would have thought we were debating whether to end apartheid what we were actually doing was arguing about the size of a feast and then an hour later we were playing those people's kids and our parents were in hindsight scum me and my friends couldn't agree on anything in this game but we would have agreed to go and have our parents arrested if they hadn't basically dissolved the army to pay for a joust this is maybe as good a time as any for me to implore you to play King still Emma with a full five players or at least four and not the minimum of three because as hopefully now you can see this is a game about discussion and observation and with five players you simply feel that much more like a council but also mechanically with five players it tends to be teams you know two people voting for aye two people voting for nay and a fifth person abstaining whereas with three I can imagine this game is a lot to Thea and less funny because it would routinely end up being two versus one which doesn't feel good but with five generally whichever way of dilemma goes a bunch of people around the table feel good which means the game is a continually feel-good experience that keeps you wanting to deal out dilemma after dilemma but the real reason this game grips like a vise is the story with alarming frequency your council's choice will instruct you to open one of 75 envelopes included in this box each of which contains a slip of extra story for you to read to do with the consequences of your actions and new dilemmas to shuffle into your deck so these dilemmas you're voting on in addition to being a kind of a moral melee with players elbowing one another to get points are also players kind of rafting down this narrative river with your paddling wildly as you approach Forks and listen if you think a dilemma is really important and it's your House's chance to leave its mark on history you are actually often rewarded for that in ways that I don't really want to spoil incidentally a lot of board games these days see players reading story aloud to the table and it is very boring but that couldn't be further from the case here not only are these cards well written and varied it also you're always going to want to hear what's on the card because it relates to the choice that you pushed through or that you were against or most heartbreakingly of all that you passed on voting on also these little cards are the perfect amount of texts neither too long not too short flicking out across the envelopes that are included in the Kings dilemma it's like looking at a chocolate selection box sweet Moorish and perfectly bite-sized so let's recap we've got a feel good funny negotiation game with a just one more round feel to it and an endlessly evolving story where everyone is desperate to see what plotline you will cause to drip from the dilemma that next as if you were reading and writing a fantasy novel together does that sound like a winning combination holy crap it is the first time my group sat down to play the Kings dilemma I brought other games with me but we just played game after game after game of this for nine hours straight and we thought that was weird but then when we met to play it a second time we once again could not put it down for another nine hours and it's not just that the individual games are good the bookkeeping between games is pretty satisfying as well now just statistically you will not win most of your games of the Kings dilemma and that sometimes won't be your fault and that is frequently annoying but what you do get to do after every game is fill in lower boxes the house you picked is going to have unique achievements for you to strive for over the course of the campaign and some of these give you permanent upgrades but a lot of them get you either prestige or crave players who come first or second in games or end up putting the most power into the decisions that annoyingly you have to admit we're actually quite good for the kingdom become prestigious while players who finish last or vote on policies that clearly benefit them get crave points which is basically a measure of how selfish your house is now if at the end of 15 games you and your friends ultimately or perhaps accidentally secure a future for this kingdom then the players who have the most prestige points are more likely to win but if your bickering drives this kingdom into darkness and perhaps even destroys it that could be great because then if you have the most crave you're more likely to be the real winner now what's fascinating about this system is by the halfway mark of your campaign in the Kings dilemma you and your friends will start to calcify in to political wings the players that are leading in Krave are gonna want a bright future for the kingdom because it's Kanna becoming their kingdom whereas the players that are leading in crave will want to retreat from this Union which is again a little close to home anyway congratulations you now have the lay of the land of one of the most unusual and inventive board games to come out in ages again where the joy is at once as simple as drawing a card from the dilemma deck reading it aloud to your friends and hearing the more consequences of their greed but also where the joy is as complicated as managing coins and power tokens and your relationship with all the other houses in order to effect sliders that may or may not win you a game in order to make marks on a sheet that may or may not have a value that you totally understand all while trying to wrestle this story so it goes in the direction that you think you wanted to and if you're listening to be talking and thinking that this maybe sounds a little overly experimental perhaps even something of an incoherent contest I've got to say your instincts are not wrong the King's dilemma is a lot of things it is a triumph it is a game that I will be telling people to buy for years to come and it is also rickety in places routinely my friends and I would finish a game of it and spend five minutes griping about how that last game was actually kind of unfair or I don't actually really know what I'm doing right now before we would decide as a group to jump straight back into the next game the kings that I'm up it's like moving into a beautiful old mansion where the floorboards grown under your weight and the shower occasionally drenches you in cold water but you won't care because there is always a new room to discover or a new window that offers a beautiful new perspective on this property of yours or at least that was the case for my group I will also say that this game is the definition of an experience where you get out what you put in it's like a murder mystery dinner party or a mega game in that way the comparison I can draw here is that like mega games role-playing is part of the fun but role-playing is easy and natural rather than intimidating because you're not given some wooly character to be you're just a job and a stereotype with some clashing desires to create drama if you can lean into that if you can see yourself arguing on behalf of fictional starving peasants and maybe just maybe actually caring about what happens to them and you have a full 5 players the atmosphere that this game creates is just phenomenal like me and my friends happen to pick for quite conservative houses out of the twelve which meant that we had this thing where whenever a dilemma came up to do with art or culture we would all start chanting bad ban ban it before the person had even finished reading the dilemma we have had so much fun with this box then again if you are something of a career stick-in-the-mud if the idea of learning the geography of a fantasy realm strikes you as very silly if you'd rather spend your evenings frightening your friends with arithmetic or strategy rather than playing a game where when you look up how to win it only gives you a coy wink I don't know how the King's dilemma would do for your group I don't know if you should buy it but I think you knew that already however for the rest of you who quite fancy the idea of spending an evening pouring yourself a glass of wine and trying to find your inner Cersei by justifying atrocities you are gonna just have such a wicked time with this game it smells so good I should probably put it back though because otherwise this is going to be what we call in the business a bad edit of course this game gets the shut up and sit down recommend seal it's the best legacy game that I've played since pandemic legacy or Goom Haven it's the most successful experiment in board game narrative since the fog of love and it's done the best job of the railing my work because rather than playing new games I just want to play this all day since kracken all however since you guys are into alternative recommendations if you want a legacy game about government that's a little less house of cards a little more Parks and Rec I'll tell you what's lovely matchi Koro legacy it's as Pacey as a pace car powered by a pacemaker it's also just a little game of rolling dice and probabilities as opposed to a grandiloquent narrative experiment but hey little games need love too and you know what if you're worried that your group might not be ready for something is involved or complicated or mean as the Kings dilemma magic or legacy could be a perfect little warm-up if you've enjoyed this video seeing everything that modern board games can be and if you haven't heard of either gloom Haven or pandemic legacy you should absolutely check out our reviews of those two two more board games that took the top of our heads in recent years cheers everybody

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 599,967

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Matt Lees

Id: XaTHH7xDRqE

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2020