It's a Wonderful Kingdom

The Game

This is a two player game of card drafting and tableau building. Every round you get a hand of cards, but these are not yours yet. You need to go through a drafting process to determine which cards you actually get. There are two groups of cards on the table. You will be adding two cards into one or both of the groups and then your opponent will pick a group to take. The groups do not necessarily have the same number of cards. After going through this drafting process, you will likely get some cards from your opponent and you will likely also get some of the cards you were initially dealt. The rest of the round will be about using your cards. Some can be discarded for resources. Some will be constructed as buildings. Buildings generate resources or give you points.

In this screenshot you can see two groups of cards with one card each, and your hand of cards from which you pick cards to add to one or both of the groups. 

One twist is sometimes you can add cards to a group face down. The reason for this is there are some bad cards which penalise the player holding it. Your opponent won’t know whether a face down card is a good card that you are trying to scare him away from picking, or a bad card which you want to trick him into taking.

This is a typical card. Top left corner is the cost to construct the building. Top right corner is the resource you get immediately if you discard it. Along the bottom is the production ability of the building if you own it. 

This is a bad card. It forces you to discard a card as long as you still hold it. You need to spend 3 armies (top left corner) to get rid of it. If you still have it by the end of the game, you lose 4 points (bottom right corner). 

This is an expensive card. It gives you a one-time bonus of three armies the moment you construct it (icons above the card name). At game end, it scores 2 points for every blue building you have (bottom left). 

The Play

I played the game with Jetta on boardgamearena.com. A big part of the game is about reading your opponent correctly. I did poorly in this, often taking the bad cards when I claimed groups containing face down cards. I had a poor start, and that had a cumulative effect. My resource generation engine was weaker and I could not keep up with Jetta. We ended the game with a huge gap.

On BoardGameArena.com, constructed buildings are placed at the bottom left of the screen. These were my buildings. 

These were Jetta's buildings around the same time. 

These were his buildings at game end. 

The Thoughts

The game has a somewhat interesting I-divide-you-choose mechanism. The threat of bad cards and the option to add cards face down is clever. The building construction, resource production and point scoring parts of the game are pedestrian. Nothing to write home about. As the players start building their kingdoms, there will be a tendency to collect buildings which combo well. So there will be more basis to guess what your opponent wants. You will also be able to better determine the value of a card to your opponent. Overall, I feel most of the game could have been made simpler. Do take this with a grain of salt, since I did so horribly at the game.