The Old King's Crown

Backed this on the strength of the art alone, which I’ll admit isn’t usually how I decide what to fund, but every preview image looked like something out of an illustrated fantasy novel and it delivered on that front completely. In person it’s even better than the renders, easily one of the best-looking games on my shelf.

The actual mechanism is a lane battler, you’re fighting across several regions at once, but the resolution is deliberately simple: each side plays one card blindly to a region and hopes they guessed the matchup right. That’s a genuinely different feel from most lane battlers I’ve played, which tend to layer on more information and more counterplay. Here it’s closer to a bluffing game wearing a battler’s clothes, more about reading your opponent’s tendencies over several rounds than reacting to visible information.

First play was rough. The rulebook doesn’t flow especially well, there are a lot of phases, and questing, one of the core actions, ended up feeling like an afterthought rather than the thing the title implies it should be. It took us a full session before things started clicking and the blind-reveal mechanic stopped feeling arbitrary and started feeling like actual mind games.

That’s my real hesitation with it. Early plays genuinely can feel like you’re placing cards more or less randomly until you’ve built up a read on how your specific opponent thinks, and I’m not sure everyone’s going to stick around long enough to get there. My more patient regular is completely sold on it. My more impatient one still isn’t sure there’s a game under the artwork.

Three stars for now, mostly because I think it needs more plays than most games to prove itself, and I haven’t logged enough yet to say for certain it’s there.