As the new Earl, you’ll hereupon be in charge of managing this small, peaceful Duchy. Will you focus on keeping monsters at bay, or is building roads to new domains more important to you? How you choose to run things is entirely your choice, but remember, choices have consequences, and only the finest territory will be awarded the title of Southern Capital of Valeria. Will you make the Queen proud, or simply fall to the wayside?

What Is It?

A roll and write game where players will take turns as the active player, rolling 6 dice. All players will activate the black dice every turn, marking guild tracks based on the citizens they have already recruited. Then, the active player will use one of the colored dice to recruit a citizen (yellow), slay a monster (red), or build a road (green); the full value of the blue die can be added to any of the other dice, if the player so chooses.

As players fill out certain sections of their boards with the actions they choose, they’ll trigger additional actions based on the pips they fill in, giving them more opportunity to fill in their boards. Players are trying to earn points in various ways (star pips, statue cards, domains, monsters, et cetera). Once someone fills in 3 guild tracks, the end of the game is triggered. Players finish the round and score. Most points wins!

Who Is It For?

  • 1 – 4 Players – Scales well at any count
  • Ages 10+ – Rules are pretty simple, but the game can get a little overwhelming if you have a turn where you trigger a lot of different actions
  • Fans of roll and write style games and being able to trigger multiple actions per turn
  • Players who like minimal player interaction

Variants/Expansions

The Winter Expansion is just a slightly different map. The game plays almost exactly the same except that now before slaying monsters, players have to reach the monster lairs by filling in certain trails first (all monsters were always accessible on the original board). The starting pips for trails are also in different spots on the winter map. It’s a slight variation, which is easy to swap out if you want a new board. It’s most interesting, of course, if you’re someone who tends to focus on monsters. I do wish it added a little more variety, but I still like it.

The solo mode was very enjoyable. For one thing, I want to mention that I love how the round tracking and the event tracking are integrated into the map itself without being distracting to the multiplayer game, but while being easy to identify when you’re playing solo; I thought that was a great graphic design touch! I like the addition of the events which can take things away from the player, or change some scoring (i.e. I had one card that made it so I only scored the lower points of any monsters I completed), but I appreciate that they are limited so you can’t just constantly be hurt by the negative effects. I think it is a great solo experience and would recommend it to solo players.

PROS

  • Aesthetics – Great art and overall graphic design
  • Components – Not many components, but everything is good quality
  • Rules – Well written/explained
  • Equal turns as active player
  • Solid solo mode
  • Easy set-up/clean-up
  • Smooth turn flow
  • I love the possibility of triggering tons of different things on your turn,

CONS

  • Since it all comes down to dice rolls, sometimes it can last a little too long; it’s possible players don’t fill in a lot of their guild track pips if they don’t recruit many citizens, or if they ones they do recruit are not rolled often, leading to a lengthier game
  • I can see the compounding actions triggering being overwhelming for some players; if you get a lot of extra things from actions, it can be difficult to keep track of them all

Final Thoughts

I really liked this game! In general, I tend to like most roll and writes. One of my early favorite roll and write games was Fleet: The Dice Game, because I loved how often I was able to use bonus pips and such to get more and more actions on my turns. I had not found another roll and write quite like that until this game. I loved that filling in a pip here could lead to filling one over there, which could lead to filling in another over there. It wasn’t like that on every single turn, of course, but those big turns that did play out were always a lot of fun. Alongside that, I always felt like I had good options every turn, no matter what was rolled on the colored dice; I never felt like a turn was wasted.

As much as I liked it, I think sometimes it could run just a little bit too long, but I also think that can often just come down to how many of the recruit actions players take earlier on in the game. Overall, I think if you like roll and writes, and like having a lot of different options for your rolls, then you’re definitely going to like this one! I certainly recommend both the solo and multi-player game!

Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 8/10

Designer – Levi Mote
Artist – Mihajlo Dimitrievski
Publisher – Daily Magic Games
MSRP – $30.00 (base game); $15.00 (refill sheets);
$15.00 (Winter Expansion)
Website

*I was provided a copy of this game to do this review*

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