My Kingdom for a Domino

Ever since the German Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award was split in 2011 to add a Kennerspiel des Jahres ("Expert" Game of the Year), the original award has gone to more straightforward games. It now feels like the eligibility barriers include that the game can't take more than half an hour to play, or more than 2 or 3 minutes to learn the rules. Despite this, there have been some very satisfying winners, such as Codenames. But I'm not so sure about this year's winner, Kingdomino.

Starting with a single square shaped tile, players much each build a kingdom that fits within a 5x5 grid. They do this by drafting "domino" shaped tiles, each featuring one or two terrain types (from about half a dozen that exist in the game). When placing a new tile in the domain, at least one of the two sides must be placed adjacent to matching terrain type (or to the starting square, which can touch anything). Tiles are numbered, with more powerful ones numbered higher. The order of power taken in one round determines the order of drafting in the following round -- if you get a weaker tile, you'll choose sooner from next round's options. Some tiles have crown symbols in one of the two terrain squares. This is how scoring works. At the end of the game, you score points in each of your terrain zones -- the number of squares in the zone multiplied by the number of crowns in the zone.

And that's it.

I will say in praise of Kingdomino that it feels like one of the more effective bridges into "hobby gaming" that has come along in a while. I can easily imagine explaining it to non-gamers, and it is certainly more satisfying to play by far than the games "most people have heard of." It probably displaces Carcassonne as the easiest tile game to bridge people into the larger world of games; there's no need to explain wacky farm scoring, no pain points in deploying all your workers too fast.

That said, I just wasn't all that thrilled by it. Some of this may have to do with trying it pretty quickly on the heels of Between Two Cities, which I found to be a far more satisfying "simple tile laying game." But it's also a good deal less compelling than other recent Spiel des Jahres winners, such as Hanabi or Camel Up. It's so easy to see the best move every time that your decision making is trivial, and you can easily tell when someone else is doing well enough that you won't win. Even when a game runs only 20 minutes or so, it's a bit rough to feel certainty by minute 5 that you're going to lose.

I wouldn't refuse to play Kingdomino again; it wasn't that unsatisfying. But that's mainly because I know that playing a game of it would still leave plenty of time for other games during an all-night get-together. (Even then, I'd try to steer toward Between Two Cities instead.) I give Kingdomino a B-. There's a nice simplicity to it, but it's just a little too simple for my tastes.