Kingdom Duet

Given all the chaos in the world, I’m keeping the K2 playtest open for the foreseeable future. Don’t worry about any deadlines right now, just play and have fun. If you have feedback or posted about your game somewhere, send it my way. But again: just play and have fun.

Lots of people have jumped in with all sorts of backgrounds, including many who have played the original Kingdom and many who have not. That broad range of experience makes for a much better playtest, so if you’re new to Kingdom (or story games in general) and want to join in, don’t be shy!

Several eagle-eyed players have noticed that while the text says that there are special rules in the back for playing Kingdom with only two-players, there are in fact no special rules in the back for playing Kingdom with only two-players. Yep, my bad.

The good news is that adjusting Kingdom for only two players is pretty easy. Same rules as normal, except:

• Each player make three locations instead of two (take turns as usual).
• Each player make two minor characters instead of one. That gives you two main and four minor characters to work with.
• Both of your Bonds will be to the other main character, but each player should come up with a different aspect of their relationship rather than repeating the same Bond. That gives our two main characters interesting and complicated connections, which is good because the story is all about them.
• Increase the checkboxes for Crossroads and Crisis by one (as though there were three players instead of two).

And you might be thinking, wait a minute, there are three Roles. If there are only two main characters, will one Role always be empty?!? And yes, you’d be exactly right. That can happen in any game of Kingdom but it will always happen in a two-player game. What you chose to control and what you leave up to fate is up to you. The good news is the mechanics are weighted so that the fewer players there are, the less likely you are to have something unpredictable and bad happen because no one is covering that aspect of the Kingdom. With two-players you incur bad-random things only half the time.

When I made Kingdom way back when, I really didn’t think it would work as a two-player game, but when I actually played it was surprisingly fun. So give it a shot!