Kingdomino is a tile-laying game which, like dominoes, requires players to make matches between pieces bearing a variety of patterns. Here, however, those patterns aren’t numbers, but areas of land in a kingdom, such as wheat fields, forests and oceans. Illustrated with a fairy tale-like quality and an appealing color palette, its components are lovely to look at.
A game of Kingdomino. Note the meeples on the four dominoes – those are where the really tricky bit comes in!
Just as appealing are its truly unique game mechanics. On the first turn, you play your meeple on one of four available dominoes. The other players do the same with the remaining dominoes until they have all claimed one. You then place your domino, aiming to place those with crowns in large regions of composed of squares (or half-dominoes) of that type. At the end of the game, you will multiply the number of crowns in a region by the number of squares in it.
The tricky bit, though, comes in the next round. Whoever took the first domino in the row last time gets first pick this time. Why not always take the first one, then? There's the delightful twist: they are arranged in order from least to most desirable, forcing players to make fiendish trade-offs.
A sample kingdom at the end of the game. This was my mother's, who beat me soundly with her big ocean!
This fascinating mechanic, paired with the strategy of building high-scoring regions, makes the game lots of fun. Once you’ve played a round, you’ll see how it won Spiel Des Jahres, Germany's game of the year award, in 2017. It’s highly replayable and plays in only fifteen minutes.
The box's cover, boasting that it claimed the coveted "Spiel des Jahres", or "game of the year".
If you’re not sure, you can play this game on Board Game Arena, a website which allows you to play games with friends remotely or in the same place without owning a copy. Their library is constantly growing and they’ve got a great adaptation of this game. They regularly add casual games, so this is a great place to go to check out games of that nature, and I'll mention in my review for a game whether this website includes it.
This game is a real winner, and I can only recommend giving it a shot and adding it to your collection. Time spent not playing in this game – or downtime – is low because turns are shared and although it is very easy to learn, it offers a great deal of strategic depth.
I hope this review was useful. If you’ve been liking these posts, please do let your friends know about this site – it would really help me if you all spread the word.
Thank you and happy board gaming!
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