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We Got Played #4: Kingdom Builder!
47 Plays1 month ago
Today on We Got Played, we take a look at one of two Spiel des Jahres winning board games from Donald X. Vaccarino, Kingdom Builder! Does it deserve the hype and awards? Tune in to find out!
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Transcript
Introduction and Game Reveal
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome back. This is Isaac. I'm Jesse. And this is We Got Played. Jesse, what was it this time? Today we got played Kingdom Builder.
00:00:26
Speaker
Kingdom Builder. Builder. Builder.
Donald X Vaccarino's Achievements
00:00:31
Speaker
So Kingdom Builder is a Donald X Vaccarino game. You might know Donald X Vaccarino from some other game. Dominion is probably his best known game. ah Donald was ah on Five Games for Doomsday podcast, one of our favorites, and he quipped that his...
00:00:54
Speaker
um his hobby was designing games, but his job was cashing Dominion expansion checks. And it's too bad because you know Donald is is one of ah very, very, very few game designers to have won two Spiel des Jahres games, awards rather, for two different games.
Kingdom Builder's Awards and Release
00:01:13
Speaker
He won it for Dominion, of course, and for Kingdom Builder, which is a Queen Games release back in 2011, 2012. Well, it won the 2012 spiel, so I'm guessing 2011. Yeah, something like that. Well, it's Queen Games, though, so it was probably, well, who knows? doesn't matter. If you're interested in exactly the dates of these things, there's a great website I would recommend. It's called BoardGameGeek at BoardGameGeek.com, and there's tons of information there about games. it Came out 2011. 2011, there you go.
Basic Gameplay Overview
00:01:47
Speaker
All right, so what did we like about Kingdom Builder? Kingdom Builder has a very simple gameplay loop. You draw a card that gives you a terrain. There are different terrain types on the board, and you can only play within that terrain.
00:02:07
Speaker
if possible, adjacent to houses that you've already built. So you build houses on the terrain that you get, and then you draw the next card, and the next card has another terrain on it, and you're supposed to build contiguously with the houses that you've already built.
00:02:21
Speaker
And it's a simple mechanism, but it feels like it could go very, very deep because we're both playing on the same board. Yeah, if you've played these Hex Encounter war games or if you're an old RPGer, this will be very comfortable. You've got this hex grid map and different terrain types, I think five different terrain types. And then printed on the the map is also ah castles.
00:02:47
Speaker
And then there are a couple of special
Modularity and Victory Conditions
00:02:49
Speaker
locations. Now because this is a Donald X game, we've got lots of modularity and variability. So we've got eight different ah board quadrants and you randomly pick four to put together and each board quadrant is tied to a specific special building. And that special building, when you touch it, grants you a a tile of that type that is connected to a specific special power. Maybe it lets you put down another house on the board on a particular terrain type or it lets you move a house to another place or whatever it is.
00:03:22
Speaker
And also we have modularity in that there are 10 different scoring cards. And in any given game, you'll only use three. And these tell you how to score. So, for example, we had one that said, um score for being next to water.
00:03:40
Speaker
So every one of your hexes, any one of your houses built on a hex next to water scores a point. We had a different one that had like a Canizia scoring that said, um look at your, ah the the four different quadrants and find the quadrant where you have the fewest houses and score three points per house. So see yeah, around there. For that quadrant. right So there's different um options. There's another one that was like a merchant. It would allow you to score points for connecting castles and other terrain types. ah Not terrain types, but special locations to one another, like you're building a trade route.
Strategic Depth Despite Simplicity
00:04:18
Speaker
ah So you kind of get three random victory
00:04:23
Speaker
conditions and you get these four modular boards that connect to these four special abilities and the boards themselves can be arrayed in lots of different ways so you have lots of combinations lots of modularity but a very simple core system On your turn, you've got a card in your hand shows a terrain tile.
00:04:45
Speaker
Play it. Take three of your houses, put them down on that terrain type adjacent to other buildings you've already got down, if possible. And that's the key.
00:04:57
Speaker
If possible. Because what you do in this game is try and create opportunities to not play adjacent. Yes.
00:05:10
Speaker
The board is very expansive. It's big. It's four different hexes put into one. ah Four different hex grids put into one. So you want to have the opportunity to play wherever you want at different places on the board. Maybe you want to get to a city or to a certain a certain location. Maybe there are parts of the board that are blocked off by water from the main board that you started playing on. So if you set it up in such a way that the card that you draw has a terrain type that you're not adjacent to, you actually free up a lot more moves on the board than you would if you were adjacent to that terrain type.
00:05:43
Speaker
Yeah, and this is kind of an example of a game that has a hook that is really difficult to explain. it has to be experienced because the hook here is that you want optionality.
00:06:01
Speaker
You want to be able to go wherever you want to go. But whenever you put down houses, you create adjacencies potentially to other terrains that force you to go there instead of where you want to go. It's a little bit like being on a road trip with like a just a three eight-year-old triplets in the back. Right? They all want to go somewhere else. They all see the exciting thing over there. Oh, look, there's a forest. We should go to the forest. We're trying to get to the castle, son. I want to go to the forest. Right? and Like, you really struggle because in trying to get to one thing, you create the conditions that force you
00:06:45
Speaker
to go elsewhere, that force you to lay down, you're very limited, you have 40 houses, you're going lay them all down at the end of the game, and that's it. So, you know, if you get driven off to these rabbit trails, um you're not going to succeed in being efficient in chasing the conditions that give you victory, that chasing chasing the locations that are meaningful to go to.
00:07:08
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. And I think it is interesting that this game is called Kingdom Builder, because when I think of Kingdom, I'm thinking I'm building this big contiguous area when actually the dominant strategy, as we've found, at least the one that won me a game, is to try to get in as many places as possible and as many different separated locations.
00:07:29
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not sure if it's technically a dominant strategy. No, not not officially, but it's the one that won me the game. it Oh, you happened to win one of the rounds, and now I'm going to hear about it for the next 17 podcasts. Well, I do want to touch, though, on on the issue of of setting, because you know when I said that it has a difficult-to-articulate hook, that's usually the kind of thing that is going to really hurt a game especially one aiming at this market which this is a casual game this is a family weight game you can teach this to your grandmother I don't know why people say that my grandmother was brilliant and an incredible player of games and you didn't have to more than arch your eyebrow to explain stuff to her So I don't know what the deal is with Grandmothers. But you could really, you could explain this to your pet turtle. This is a super easy game to teach and, you know, even after one play it clicks, I think um it was Vez Arpin one of the denizens of the five games for Doomsday Discord, And, you know, for listeners who are not in on that Discord, look, this podcast is very much a spinoff of that whole environment and community. And, you know, I hope Ben is okay with me driving people into the Discord from this show. Maybe one day we'll, you know, ascend the heights of popularity and have our own Discord. But until then, I'm just going to treat that as our home away from home. But Vez Arpanen recommended that when you teach this game, you...
00:09:04
Speaker
You play four turns and then everyone starts again. yeah Just so that everyone sort of gets that little bit of, oh, I don't want to be near everything. I kind of want to be isolated so that then I can jump around. But all of which, I've lost my train of thought. What I was trying to say, going to come back. we're goingnna We're going to reel it back in.
Theme vs. Mechanics
00:09:23
Speaker
is it has a weird hook, but it also has a very compelling visual in that the box art is lovely. You've got you know a knight rearing up, ah you know the horse is rearing up, and they're staring at this castle with a town around it and another castle off in the distance and kingdom builder.
00:09:43
Speaker
And that's quite evocative and and kind of cool. And I'm sure that people have picked up the box and said, oh yeah, that's interesting. I kind of like that. um But the game is not kingdom builder at all. You don't build a kingdom. You put down 40 Catan wood houses.
00:10:01
Speaker
I mean, which maybe feels like network building, kind of. little actually. It's a little bit more route building, so it's not kingdom builder. It's more like road paver. Except, again, you're putting down houses, like caravan Yeah.
00:10:18
Speaker
person guy I don't know. it's it's You're not building and you're not kingdoms. um it's it It is a point-to-point network building, route connecting game that's themed around, for some reason, i don't know, a kingdom. It could have been a train game.
00:10:35
Speaker
I think that that a little bit depends on the kind of the game that you get from the output of the cards, what powers you're using and what are your endgame scoring conditions. Because we did have a game in which the endgame scoring condition was to have a very, very large single contiguous area.
00:10:51
Speaker
So I just had 39 connected houses in the middle of the board and that felt a little bit more like Kingdom Builder. This game that we played most recently had one where you had to connect the locations to the castles and that felt a little bit more like Route Builder. I think it should have just been general contractor.
00:11:10
Speaker
I mean, you're just building houses. You're building them in a row. You're building them in a cluster. You're building them here. You're building them there. You're you're basically just um you know developing ah some kind of, what you call it, a subdivision.
00:11:25
Speaker
like um It's not even a medieval subdivision. I don't know. The technology level is unclear. um But all that said, we do, I think, have to... recognize how much gain comes out of how few components. yeah So it's 25 cards in this a terrain deck that you're drawing from. It's 10 kingdom cards.
00:11:50
Speaker
It's eight um tiles that kind of correspond to the special abilities on the eight different boards. Right. um And then a handful of smaller counters. i mean, really a handful. And that's it.
Replayability and Enjoyment
00:12:05
Speaker
That's that's that's the whole game.
00:12:07
Speaker
ah Plus the eight modular boards themselves. It's quite a slender package that packs in a ton of replayability. It really does. And we've played this game a bunch. And I think we had fun times every time. And we played three different versions of this game with the the different cards and the different powers. And I really do feel like this game is very, very replayable.
00:12:29
Speaker
Yeah, and we're just playing it at two players. And, you know, I could easily see playing this at three or four, and I'm sure it'll feel a little different, and the board will get more crowded. Yeah.
00:12:40
Speaker
In some ways, having more people on the board cutting you off is probably also going to feed into that core mechanism of, oh, well, you cut me off, but by doing so, you actually freed me up.
00:12:52
Speaker
right Right. That happened in this game where I played into a forest and then he played into a forest that cut me off from the rest of the forest. Which guy? Who? He? You. Oh, me! Oh, you were talking about me, but I'm right here!
00:13:05
Speaker
But I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to the audience. and so when I drew my next forest card, I was cut off from the rest of the forest, so I got to go to any forest I wanted on the board.
00:13:17
Speaker
I assume you chose Mirkwood. No, Eregion? More of a first-age kind of guy? I think actually Eregion was second age, right? That's where Celebrimbor crafted the rings. ah
00:13:33
Speaker
Anyway, ah
Learning Curve and Rewards
00:13:35
Speaker
so we liked this quite a bit, I think, and i would love to try it at a larger player count and see see what it feels like. um is there Is there anything that that we think is maybe a missed opportunity or anything that kind of rubbed you the wrong way as we played this?
00:13:53
Speaker
I think it feels like it has a very high ceiling for enjoyment, but also it could have a very low floor because the game the decisions that you make do have fairly intense consequences that play out over multiple turns. and maybe making a bad move earlier on and not having endgame scoring conditions that totally support what you've actually ended up doing on the board, it's it you could chalk it up to player you know, a player issue, but still playing a losing game for 15 turns remains not fun.
00:14:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a fair criticism. I know that my first time that I played it years ago, i was kind of dissatisfied with it and and was a little turned off by it, which, again, you know, in today's market, a game has got to sing on the first play.
00:14:49
Speaker
Mm-hmm. And Kingdom Builder, I think, you know, the experience that I had back when I played it in probably 2011, 2012, and that you had ah playing it now and that Vez was telling us his family had, is that it's not a great first play.
00:15:09
Speaker
And maybe that says something about what's happened to games that... some of what Kingdom Builder offers unfolds in subsequent plays.
00:15:21
Speaker
Right. And it's not a painful game to play several times, even several times in a row. Yeah, the box says 45. It plays in like 20. ah for For two players, absolutely. And again, you know I'm sure you'll have your AP players out there who will stretch this out into a War of the Ring length game. They're really leaning into the kingdom building aspects.
00:15:43
Speaker
ah but But no, it's it's a relatively quick game. I mean, i mean it it feels like it fits into like Ingenious. You know, it's in that sort of same area of we're all gonna think a little bit and then make our play and then go on and... There's only 12, 13 turns, so it doesn't take that long. But here's the thing, right? This game needs that space to breathe and to unfold some of its secrets. And I almost feel like if you were designing this today, you'd you'd be racking your brain for how to get players to...
00:16:15
Speaker
get to the part where they get it. Right. Faster. Like, i have a game like this. I have a game that I was working on for a long time with Raph Koster, which is about... ah It's a similar thing. You're laying flowers um and you're you're kind of creating...
00:16:36
Speaker
rows and you're getting around. I mean, it's it's, again, these spatial growth pattern. It's actually, you know, you're you're actually trying to grow flowers by connecting vines. um And the feedback I consistently get, no matter what I've done to it, is that it's real, like, just tough to get through that first play. um And, you know, everyone who gets to the third play is like, yeah, this is terrific, but that first play or two can be kind of challenging to to really feel like you understand what you're doing and feel like it's easy to play.
00:17:11
Speaker
And it really, i I don't know, can Kingdom Builder, can a game like Kingdom Builder succeed in 2026? It succeeded for me, and I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of the board game industry, but I feel like if you know what you're getting into and you know you're not going to get this until the third play, I would recommend it.
00:17:30
Speaker
Because it is really really fun when you get to that third play and you've actually figured things out and that's what I had the best time with it. Yeah, you know, I think you're saying something really interesting here that maybe Insiders to the market like myself don't really understand deeply enough because ah feel like the hobby players the the passionate um and and dedicated board game enthusiasts will often just play a game like this once and kind of pass it by because they're trying to get 300 games and 400 games and 500 games played a year and they want to post their BGStats thumbnail on Twitter or X or Blue Sky or Green Sleeves or wherever people post things these days.
Market Dynamics Discussion
00:18:19
Speaker
And, um you know, you you gain cred within the community for that breadth of knowledge about games. And something's really got to be special to play it several times. Light games, ironically, sometimes get skipped over because of this. So, you know, i want I want to play SETI six times, so I ain't got time for this kingdom builder. Right. And I think there's another part of the market. And Jesse, maybe you're...
00:18:47
Speaker
more representative of that part of the market, which is people who like playing games, like the idea of playing games, have played several games, don't have a multi-hundred game collection, and are totally fine with the idea of, oh look, Kingdom Builder, let's play this 20 times. And I think that's totally me, because we're recording right now in front of a shelf with over 100 unplayed games. Yeah, I mean...
00:19:09
Speaker
the I think the the much broader market, the folks who buy all these games that the Spiel des Jahres is aimed at, would be delighted to receive a game like Kingdom Builder that has so much play in one box where you don't have to learn the rules each time for some new thing that might suck. Like, I don't know, some game about dinosaurs and duels.
00:19:35
Speaker
I...
00:19:38
Speaker
i Really really enjoyed our brief trip into Kingdom Builder and I can see it being something that comes out quite a lot I can see it being something that ah we play with the family. I think it's it's easy enough to to kind of pull them into so I am really glad that that we got a chance to to bring it to the table Do you have any final thoughts before we go on to raiding Kingdom Builder?
Final Thoughts and Ratings
00:20:03
Speaker
No, I really do think you've nailed it on the head. If you're only gonna play it once, you might not get everything out of it, but if you know you're gonna play it multiple times, I think you really, really will get something out of it.
00:20:14
Speaker
Well, fantastic. So on ah a rating scale of one to three kingdoms, how many kingdoms would you rate Kingdom Builder? I think it gets all three kingdoms, but we only ever built two in our games. I actually think there are zero kingdoms in the box.
00:20:32
Speaker
but But I'd be happy to build a kingdom with you anytime. I agree. I don't think we got played. I think we played. I think we got to play, and that's going to do it for us. See you next time.
00:20:47
Speaker
Do you have any questions or comments about this episode? Do you know something that we didn't say or know that something we said is false? Do you have a fun fact that you desperately want to share but can't find a way to bring it up in conversation naturally?
00:21:04
Speaker
Send it to us at feedback at wegotplayed.games. That's feedback at wegotplayed.games. Thank you for listening.