Era of Kingdoms

Plays: 3Px1.

The Game

Era of Kingdoms is a card game. Each player develops his own kingdom mostly independently. You draft cards from a common pool. You play cards into your kingdom to increase resource production, which then allows you to play better cards and further improve. You level up your kingdom to gain access to better cards, from basic to intermediate and eventually to advanced cards. After a certain number of advanced cards are drawn from the deck, the game ends and you compare scores to see who wins.

This is a town hall card. It is just a reminder for when your kingdom reaches the intermediate stage. You place this card onto your player board when you enter the intermediate stage.

If you flip over the town hall card, you convert it to a castle. This is also just a reminder - for when your kingdom reaches the advanced stage.

You start the game with an empty player board. The nine spaces on the left are for your buildings. Well, strictly speaking you only have eight. The centre space is reserved for your town hall and castle, i.e. glorified status indicator. You can't place any regular building at the central spot. The three spaces on the right are for your heroes. Space is limited. Once you've constructed a building, you can't simply decide to tear it down for something else. However you can upgrade the building to something else of the same category. As for heroes whom you recruit, if you use up all three slots, you may fire one of them to make way for a better hero.

The main board displays 6 basic cards, 3 intermediate cards and 1 advanced card. When you are to take a card, you may pick from these face-up cards, or blind draw from the relevant deck.

The "B" at the top right corner means this is a base card, which must be played onto an empty space. It can later be upgraded, i.e. have other upgrade cards played on top of it.

This card on the right has an upward arrow in the top right corner. This means it is an upgrade card, and must be played on top of another card or stack of cards of the same family. Icons at the top left are the resource requirements. Icons at the bottom are the resources being produced. The number at the bottom right is the victory point value. This card on the left, Wall, has numbers at the bottom left. These two numbers are attack and defense values respectively. In this game you may attack your opponents and attempt to rob them.

This is a player reference card. On your turn, you get three actions. You spend them to either take a basic card, or play a card. That's all. Once you are done, you may discard any number of cards from your hand, and then redraw up to your hand limit (usually 5). Depending on which level your kingdom is at, you may get to draw intermediate cards or advanced cards during the redraw phase. With the basic action you can't take intermediate or advanced cards.

The second card in the top row is an event card. When you play such a card, you execute what the text says and discard the card.

The card at the top right is an advanced card. The other three are intermediate cards. These cards are much more costly to play than basic cards. Look at all those icons along the top.

Everyone starts the game with three such Treasure cards. They are worth 1VP each. If you are short of one resource to play a card, you may buy the missing resource from any other player by paying him a Treasure. He can't refuse. You are effectively giving him 1VP, which is a lot. VP's are not easy to come by. When you conduct an attack by playing an Attack event card, you attack every other player. Anyone who fails to protect himself must give you one Treasure. Attacking can be lucrative. If you run out of Treasures, you no longer need to fear attacks, but you will have less flexibility when you have no Treasure.

The Play

From the rules, Era of Kingdoms does not seem like much. However, in play, I find the game smooth and pleasant. You are purposefully upgrading your kingdom, and being constantly progressing is a positive and encouraging experience. You are always competing with others for good cards on the main board. There is a race element in trying to grab all the good cards. Not every card will have the same value to every player, but often a good card is a good card and there will be more than one player eyeing it greedily. There is aggression. Not a lot, but enough to make you think. Stealing treasures is lucrative enough to make you want to attack others. Yet if you are militarily weak and decide not to do anything about it, the worst case is losing 3VP to the warmongers, and losing some flexibility. I think this is a clever balance.

On the card backs of the basic, intermediate and advanced cards you can see the crests of four kingdoms. They are simple on the basic cards, but get prettier and more elaborate on the intermediate and advanced cards. I like this.

In the early game I had buildings producing all four types of resources. I placed them in the four corners of my kingdom, because I noticed there was a type of building which increased production of adjacent buildings. I wanted to leave space for such buildings. Unfortunately for the rest of the game I never managed to get such buildings. Wasted effort.

My top right and bottom right buildings were Level 2 buildings now. Both my heroes were Level 2 too. With a total of four Level 2 cards in play, I qualified for intermediate kingdom, and that was why my town hall card was now placed in the middle of my player board.

All three of my heroes had attack and defense strengths (bottom left corners of the cards).

A 3-player game. I had 5 Treasure cards on the right side of my player board now. This was because I had launched an attack, and managed to rob one Treasure card each from Allen and Ivan.

In our late game, almost every single advanced card was claimed by whoever it was taking his turn. They were all valuable, and we could all afford the resources. It felt like a no-brainer. I wonder whether this is an imbalance problem, or it just so happened that all three of us managed our resource production well enough to be always able to build any advanced card that came up. In late game, it was all about maximising efficiency and squeezing out every VP that we could out of our kingdoms. We no longer needed to bother with improving production. Late game was a little dull, but thankfully it was not long.

The Thoughts

Era of Kingdoms doesn't do anything groundbreaking. It is a light and pleasant game in which you are purposefully progressing and constantly improving. It's equivalent to a feelgood movie - don't expect anything deep, just relax and enjoy the process. This is a light-to-medium weight that will work for non-gamers and casual players.