Paladins of the West Kingdom is a title from Garphill Games. They make
many good heavy strategy games, and they have a certain style to their games,
both in art direction and in gameplay. In Paladins of the West Kingdom,
you need to protect your medieval city from foreign attacks. You need to build
walls, defeat attackers, maybe convert them. The stars of the show are the
paladins the king sends to help you. Every round you get to pick who to
support you, and utilising their strengths well is crucial in defending your
city.
The main game board
This is more or less a worker placement game. Every round you get several
workers of different types, and you place them at specific worker spots to
perform actions. Most of the action spots are on your own player board, so you
don't interfere with other players much. On the main board, as the game
progresses, some good worker placement spots will open up, and you normally
want to fight for those. There are also spaces on the main board which allow
you to place other game pieces to claim goods and other benefits. You will
compete over these too.
The player board
The track on the left of your player board is important. You use this to track
your three attributes - Strength, Faith and Influence. You will get to
increase these attributes as you perform certain actions. At the same time,
some actions can only be performed if a specific attribute has reached a
certain level. So you must manage your attributes.
There are four rows of tokens on the player board - green, black, red and
blue. They are related to different actions. Whenever you perform an action,
you will remove one token. You want to focus on only a subset of these action
types, because ideally you want to remove all the tokens of a type. Only the
last few tokens are worth points (see the yellow ribbons).
Some worker placement spots require workers in a specific colour. If you don't
have the right colour, you can't use the spot. One spot lets you swap a worker
for a joker (purple). However this comes with a risk. You get bad reputation,
which can lead to a penalty.
This is one of the paladins. Every round you draw three, pick one, move one
the the bottom of the deck, and place one at the top of the deck. Paladins
give you a temporary attribute boost, e.g. the one above increases your
Strength (red) by four. Paladins also give you two workers.
The paladins are all pretty useful
There are only two resources in the game, money and provisions. For some
actions you need to spend these, so you have to make sure you generate income,
or you make good use of discounts.
The major actions require you to have certain attributes at certain levels,
and when you perform them, they increase another attribute. For example you
need Faith to commission monks, and when you do that, you increase Influence.
When you absolve sins, you need Influence, and you increase Faith. When you
pair these two action types, commissioning monks and absolving sins, you can
steadily increase both your Influence attribute and Faith attribute.
Enemies can be defeated, or they can be converted to your cause. They give
different benefits depending on whether you defeat them or convert them.
The game feels a little solitaire to me, because most of the time I'm just
playing on my own board. I have my own deck of paladins to manage. Everyone
has the same deck, just that the order cards show up will be different. This
game is a complex puzzle to sort out, and it is satisfying to work through
that. The paladins are fun because they break rules, for example allowing you
to perform certain actions for free.
Player interactions happen on the main board. They are indirect, mostly in the
form of if you have taken a slot, or a card, then I can't take it any more.
Sometimes the impact can be significant, for example two players can benefit
much from a certain enemy and they both want it. So this is a pretty Euro kind
of player interaction. Paladins of the West Kingdom is a game
of planning, and maximising your resources and actions.
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