The King's Dilemma deconstructed

Still looking at the old board games, I came across King's Dilemma . One game I would be very interested in: it’s a solid narrative game that mostly deals with the consequences of your decisions. It's an old game with about 15 games, and it takes about 15 hours to complete. The game has a specific type of Game of Thrones, in which each player imagines a house in a low fantasy area, sitting on the board and solving various dilemmas that the king faces. As for the mechanics of the game, it’s pretty straightforward: If you know the Reigns video game, it’s basically a multiplayer version. Each dilemma is a vote for or against, each player votes and puts strength signals on his vote to influence the result, the more votes he wins, and the player who gives more power after the vote becomes the responsible leader. for the result. Each player hides and reveals their plans, and will not vote for the best for the kingdom, but the best for their home. Players are encouraged to discuss, negotiate, make purchases, play role-playing games, etc., so the game is generally very political. In a relatively low bet the houses cannot be removed, they lose their land or something like that, each vote goes down to a different victory point in each match.

As a game of political negotiation, the King’s dilemma is not possible on its own and it plays very badly with only two or three players. Basically, you need at least 4 players and the top 5. Since it’s only been a number of times in the last 12 months that I’ve had more than 4 players play a board game, I’ve finally bought Dilemma King . Your mileage may change; But best of all, you will need 4-5 players who are allowed to play at least 4 sessions of at least 4 hours before the end of the campaign. It's not easy.

To make matters worse, you don’t want these 4-5 strong players to worry too much about the mechanics of the game and win. King's Dilemma doesn't even tell you how to win the campaign until it's over. Since I hadn’t bought the game, but was still curious to know how it went, I ended up reading a very detailed review of The King Dilemma on the blog . Very devastating, and as the writer himself puts it: "Looking at the magnifying glass game, I destroyed some of the magic that was in this game. I also blew up a treasure trove of excitement trying to control the players."

While the exact deconstruction of the narrative game is interesting, it certainly destroys the game. There is no game on the map of the decision tree that survives. Apart from Real Life ((a game with a lot of different challenges), I don't know if the game is more of an illusion than the feeling of the consequences of your decisions. In the King Dilemma campaign, players will make about 100 yes / no decisions. This will result in over one million (1e30) different possible combinations. It simply cannot be applied to any game, print or digital. So there are 6 main stories in King's Dilemma , each with 2-3 possible outcomes. The decision tree of any computer game or board game always has several branches of the decision tree that come together; The interpretation of the narrative may be different, but after three decisions in the tree, your kingdom will be at war *, creating a new starting point for future branch decisions. Design an entire tree and you will be disappointed and frustrated. Ignorance is happiness.

For best results, I would say that you should play The King's Dilemma with an ordinary group of people: in some cases, strong personal feelings about certain issues that the game raises will be decided by their voice, such as slavery; Other times it’s not a solid moral choice and the player can vote according to who he thinks will get the most victory points, or he can try to play his home character who appears on his game screen. Low stakes make political negotiations more difficult, say, than the diplomatic game. And after the vote, reading about the unintended consequences will make everyone laugh or moan. You may not be happy with the overall score (plus the Game of Thrones atmosphere) at the end of the campaign, but you really enjoyed every step of the way. If you gather players for a full campaign, I envy you!

Tobold's blog