To Court The King

I love Race for the Galaxy, so I decided to give To Court The King (by the same designer, Tom Lehmann) a try. I have read about it, and it seems to be well-liked generally.

In this game, you roll dice to win cards, and by game end whoever holds the King card wins. The cards won give you special abilities, like allowing you to have more dice (in the beginning you only have 3) or allowing you to change the results of your die roll in different ways. So basically you are improving your die rolling and die manipulation powers, until you are ready to go for the King (and Queen). Similar to Pickomino, you need to set aside a die, and if you decide to reroll, the die or dice already set aside cannot be rerolled or changed. However I find that I rarely need to reroll (maybe I never did). I just used the card powers to fiddle around with whatever results I rolled, and usually that's sufficient for me to win something.

Many people describe To Court the King as Yahtzee on steroids. I have never played Yahtzee nor read about it, so I don't know how they compare.

Michelle didn't like the game (despite being a big fan of Race for the Galaxy too). It didn't excite me either. I think we just played twice, and I don't need to play this anymore. Not sure why some like this. I find it a little puzzle-like, and it doesn't really have the excitement and gambling feel that dice games often give. I find Pickomino more exciting.