Ken thinks all you need is a little Patience...
KINGSBRIDGE THE GAME
Designer: Wolfgang Kramer | Publisher: Thames & Kosmos
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗120 Illustrated Cards
Ken Follett has an interesting relationship with board games.
Where most authors are looking for that celluloid version of their penned events with actors and special effects and hopefully a run of sequels.
Mr. Follet seems to have a small cottage industry running alongside his efforts, adapting his stories from very thin pressed and printed trees, to slightly thicker pressed and printed trees. I personally enjoyed playing the worker placement game Pillars of the Earth and so when I heard about Kingsbridge becoming available from Kosmos Games, then I was very interested to see what they were offering.
Where Pillars of the Earth was a striking but straightforward worker placement game where you built the main cathedral structure in the game, Kingsbridge is much more scaled back in terms of its ambition and mechanics. In fact Kingsbridge is so scaled back you might spend a couple of minutes looking for the rest of the game and the rest of the rulebook. At its core, Kingsbridge shares its mechanics with Solitaire, where you are using card manipulation and movement to create runs of thirteen cards that can then be removed from the game. The winner of the game is the first to play all of their deck, regardless of the number of runs they have personally created.
You’ll be playing your cards into a playing area of six columns of cards, which at the beginning of the game will be filled with a single random card. You’ll play your turn from a hand of six cards and on your turn you’ll be doing a mixture of playing cards from your hand or moving batches of cards from one column to another in order to build up as many runs as possible in order to discard them. Once you can no longer play a card or manipulate the columns to make further progress, play will pass to the next player.
Once you’re familiar with the game, you can introduce variable character power cards, which once per turn you can play in order to allow you to break the core mechanics of the game and allow you to do everything from starting extra columns to missing out numbers as you play. It adds an additional complexity to proceedings and certainly helps with how often you are likely to bring Kingsbridge back to the table.
This is a game that the fans of the book ‘The Evening and The Morning’ are going to appreciate. When you complete a run of 13 cards, then reading them in numerical order will provide small snippets of what occurs chronologically in the book, and there is some really pretty artwork and graphic design going on here. The special power cards each come illustrated with a character from the book and they add an additional charm to the overall look and feel of the game. Overall when Kingsbridge is sitting on the table in front of you, there’s a lot of effort going on here to make sure the theme has been represented enough to gloss over some very basic core mechanics.
What makes Kingsbridge work though is those core mechanics. It is very easy to not only introduce a player to this game, but you can have them learning and playing the game within minutes. Apart from some occasional clarification on the character powers, Kingsbridge is the kind of game that you set up, play and have a chin wag while you do it. It’s a relaxed affair without the need to learn hugely complex strategies in order to win. To be perfectly honest, when I was playing it I didn’t really care too much who was likely to win. You would define it as something light, fun and casual and if you’re a fan of Ken Follet’s work as well, then you’re going to appreciate Kingsbridge even more.
RICHARD SIMPSON
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED PATIENCE...
The playing card Version of Patience. You’ll feel right at home with the rules.
WE SAY
Designed to be something enjoyed over a lazy Sunday, easy to learn and play, with references fans of the series are going to appreciate.