IN THIS WORLD MICROSCOPE KINGDOM FOLLOW UNION Subscribe More Ars Ludi

Kingdom, Second Edition

I’ve had a second edition of Kingdom simmering for a while now and it’s finally in a place I’m really happy with. It’s looking very good.

I love playing Kingdom. Love it. My hit rate for engaging and dramatic sessions with Kingdom has always been very, very high. The game itself is great. But the rules text? Not so much. I don’t think the rules as written present the game in a simple and clear way, and there are just too many wooooords.

Over the years I’ve made small updates and patches, but there is no substitute for going in with a machete and revising the whole text. So that’s what I did. My goals were laser-focused:

  • Make Kingdom easier to pick up, learn, and play, so more people could enjoy it.
  • Make the text truly reflect how the game plays.
  • Remove unnecessary complexity or any tricky bits that get in the way or distract players. The spice must flow.

In other words, a leaner, meaner, easier Kingdom. A text that reflects the game it has always been. Are there rule changes as part of this cleanup? Yes, definitely. The heart and soul of the game is fundamentally the same but the devil is in the details. I’ll dig more into specific rule changes later.

The net result is that the rules are half as long as they used to be. HALF. It takes a lot more work to write shorter and smarter, but the players reap the rewards at the table because you have less to read to learn the game and less to flip through to find what you’re looking for. Exactly enough to tell players what they need to know: no more and no less. And it looks damn good too.

I’ve already been playtesting iterations of the new Kingdom for the last year, so now that the text is cleaned up the next step is external playtesting, sending the new version to outside groups to try out. Stay tuned…

    Ben Robbins | February 18th, 2020 | , | show 8 comments