Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I was pretty surprised to learn after the fact that this game was designed by Tom Lehmann, the same person responsible for Race for the Galaxy. While this game has cards, and those cards can be “tapped” to invoke their special abilities, this is mainly a game about dice. It’s a small game so this will be short:

• The game is very dry. It’s a bit of backstory about how you’re recruiting palace workers and officials until you reach the king and the queen, but none of it is relevant at all. It’s just abstract manipulation of dice with the powers provided by the cards.
• Like Race for the Galaxy, this game uses icons to explain the special abilities of each card. I had a hard deciphering them, which is I guess why they included the player aid explaining the abilities in English.
• The basic mechanics are easy to understand, especially since you start with just three dice and no card abilities. But once you get more than five cards or so, the combinatorial possibilities are downright AP-inducing. Particularly rich with possibilities is the ability to set off the value of a die with the value of another die.
• One important rule is that the turn order reverses each round with the last person to play in a given turn becoming the first person to play in the new turn and the start player token then moving. I don’t think I’ve seen this before. I think it’s supposed to solve the problem of one player winning simply by virtue of having an extra turn in which to act.
• Near the end of the game, you amass such a powerful set of abilities with which to manipulate the dice that it seems that actual results of your dice roll barely matters at all. We were somewhat incredulous that you could nine dice results of the same number but Sean won the game with something like twelve dice showing the same results, simply by invoking the card abilities in the right order.

While there’s no denying that this game has decent strategy, I still like it less than Airships and Kingsburg. It’s just too dry and abstract for my tastes. But then I’ve never played Yahtzee either. After reading up on it, I guess I can see why To Court the King would be better.