The King has decided to fire his key advisors. Lucky for him, you’re here to assemble a coalition of his subjects to replace them and bring peace to the kingdom. Unfortunately for you, others have the same idea. Strategize wisely to ensure your coalition is the one to win the king’s support!

What Is It?

Hand Management – Each turn players will draft one card into their hand. They can draw blindly from the deck, or take an available face-up card from the recruitment area. Then, they must dismiss a card from their hand into the area

Set Collection – In every game players can score for having sets of the same class of cards, and a sequence of consecutive cards. There are also 4 other scoring cards each game that are revealed over the first 4 rounds which will ask players to have (or not have) various cards/sets

Who Is It For?

  • 2 to 5 Players – Scales well. Always 6 rounds, so it doesn’t add a ton of time for a few more turns. A little more rotation in the recruitment area with more players
  • Ages 8 & Up – Pretty small ruleset, so it’s fairly approachable. There are advanced abilities on most cards that you can play with or without as well to help scale difficulty.
  • Fans of quick cards games with a little bit of strategy

PROS

  • Aesthetics – Nice art, clean design for abilities
  • Components – Cards are good quality, the few cardboard bits are also nice quality
  • There’s a bunch of ways to score
    • Good variety of scoring objectives
  • Turns are quick and smooth
  • Small/portable, don’t need a huge play area

CONS

  • Luck of the draw – Some players may start with a particularly strong hand, or get lucky with blind draws
  • While I thought it was unique that more scoring was revealed as the game went on, I thought the game was too short to warrant this; it made it hard to even try to go for the later cards, depending on how different they were from earlier ones, so it felt strange they were even there

Final Thoughts

This game felt a little bit to me like Fantasy Realms, where you’re swapping cards in and out of your hand, trying to optimize your scoring opportunities. Still, this felt unique because the cards had some abilities, but the scoring objectives were shared by all players, so you were likely also paying more attention to what your opponents were picking up and tossing out.

I liked all the different abilities on these cards, and I thought there was also good variety of the scoring objectives; it was interesting to see how the deal of the scoring objectives could influence players’ strategies. There was a fair bit of randomness in this though, because of not knowing all the scoring up front, but if you like a light card game, and don’t mind that, then it’s worth checking out!

Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 6/10

Designer – Derek Croxton
Artist – Rod Rodrigues
Publisher – Play to Z
MSRP – $20.00
Website

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

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