The Old King's Crown first impressions

The Old King’s Crown 👑 is a true head-turner. 🤩 I remember when we only saw pictures of the card backs and we were already entranced by the aesthetics, so we were curious what the gameplay holds in store! We were lucky enough to take part in a demo game at UKGE. 😊

The focus of the game is hand management and secret card play - which leads into mind games, bluffing and outsmarting your opponent. 🧐 It’s basically a race to get influence points: when a threshold is reached by someone, the game is over. I could mention Libertalia or Vaalbara so you better understand what this game is about - though I have to say The Old King’s Crown is a lot more intricate and complex, and with a lot of added asymmetry due to its factions.

Here’s a simplified overview of a round:
1️⃣ As the round begins, players draw up to their hand size.
2️⃣ Then everyone places their Herald in turn order on one of 6 territories. You are basically betting on where you think will win that round, but of course it could just be a misdirection.
3️⃣ Then players can place a card to bid for Kingdom Cards, but this is only resolved later. These cards give you special abilities and there seem to be a lot of them. You can only hold 2 of these abilities though.
4️⃣ Players then play a facedown card to each of the 3 rows of the board
5️⃣ You then resolve the Clashes in each row. The order is determined by the last player, and order can be essential! Normally the highest valued card wins, but there are many interesting effects that influence this. E.g. they could be assassinated by another card, or you could also boost your card through other means. There are a bunch of keywords that allow for cool plays. Whoever wins gets to activate one of the two territories of the row for its effect.

There is quite a bit of asymmetry: players will have some unique cards, and all their abilities on their player board differ.

We really liked what we saw so far. 🥰 I do think the learning curve of this game will be quite steep, and will require repeated plays so players get to know the cards and understand what they are really doing. If you like the sound of it, follow along the journey of @theoldkingscrown !