I recently had an opportunity to playtest a new game to be released from VPG. The game is called For the Crown and is designed by Jeremy Lennert.
In essence, it is a chess deck building game. While this may sound odd, it is in effect a very strategic, deep game with lots of possibilities. It is a two player game and the object is to capture the other player’s Sovereign Units. Basically, capture the King and you win. The difference is, there is no “Check” or “Checkmate”. If your opponent isn’t paying attention and lets you move into position to take their King, they lose.
The deck building potion of the game is the intriguing part. There are action, order, and treasure cards. Many of these allow you to train pieces to place in your barracks. Yes, in this game you each start with only your King on the board. You have to train additional pieces, place them in your barracks, and then deploy them onto the battlefield (board).
The board is a standard chess board, but the pieces are anything but standard. In addition to the normal pieces, Rook, Knight, Bishop, Queen, pawn, etc…There are other versions of these pieces that move in different ways. The Warlord can move 1 or 2 squares in any combination of directions. There is also the Monk, Acolyte, Gryphon, Striker and others for a total of 15 different types.
You begin the game with 10 cards in your deck. Four Guards and six Peons. The Peons can provide you 1 gold for each card, as well as train a pawn to place in your barracks. The twist here is that when you use a card to train a piece, it is trashed. So even though that Rook card will net you 3 gold to spend, if you want to get a rook on the board you will have to trash the card.
Each turn has several phases, During the Order Phase you can move one of your pieces on the board, or play an order card, or deploy a trained unit from your barracks to the board. They must start in the back row, however a foot unit can start in the first two rows as in chess.
The action phase allows you to play actions from your cards, like drawing additional cards, training units, and the like.
The buy phase lets you total up the cards in your hand that have treasure amounts and purchase one card from the stacks. If you want a queen you will have to purchase a consort card for 9 gold first. It will take you some time to get that much, as in Dominion.
Finally, you discard all of your cards and draw 5 more, also as in Dominion.
The combination of building a decent deck and playing a chess game with different movement patterns is challenging and fun. There is a lot of strategy to this game, it is very deep. There are good combos that can be obtained, but these can also be countered by an observant player. But you cant win the game by having the best deck, you can only win on the chess board. It is easy to forget that and has cost me several times in playing.
It is a game that is much more than I thought it would be when I initially looked at it and raised my eyebrows. I’m looking forward to playing again.
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If anyone is interested, the Victory Point Games web page for FOR THE CROWN is:
http://victorypointgames.com/details.php?prodId=163
This will be Jeremy’s first published boardgame, but we assure you it won’t be his last!
Alan Emrich