![]() ![]() The “opportunist” wants the direct opposite, with resources down at the bottom. If you’re “opulent,” you want as many resource tokens at the halfway mark or above, with increasing points awarded for more tokens. And, at a certain level, they’re incredibly clever, tied to the resource track in such a way that it invests you, the player, the councilor, the head of a noble house, as directly preoccupied with where all those resource tokens sit at the end of the game. These secret agendas represent the lion’s share of your points. In both cases, the game wraps up with everyone checking the secret agenda card they drafted at the outset. Or maybe we’ll draw so many cards that the current king dies. Whenever one of these trackers bumps up or down, so too will our kingdom’s stability, until it reaches the top or bottom and brings the current play to its conclusion. There are five main resources, the morale and prosperity and everything else that informs the state of our kingdom. But there’s a very different story being told at the same time, enacted mostly on the game’s resource tracks. It’s told through the usual tools of legacy games: paragraphs of flavor text, an entire column of sealed envelopes, and names penned onto player shields and legislation stickers. That’s one type of story told by The King’s Dilemma. The other type of story told by The King’s Dilemma. To an extent, this is our fault - we voted to import this millet two games ago. As in real-life dilemmas, we can only guess at how badly the millet-locusts will impact our kingdom’s agriculture. Maybe it would decline by a whole lot, spurred onward by the card outcome and whether our prosperity token has “momentum” that will make it move faster. Perhaps our prosperity would decline by one pip on the game’s central track. Moreover, we don’t know the scale of the outcomes. Sometimes there are unintended consequences. The difficult part is that these outcomes may be the complete picture or only part of it. Doing right by our people will increase our house’s strength and scoring opportunities passing bad laws will, naturally, do the opposite. This will be placed on the board, and may affect our house’s standing in future plays. Nay, on the other hand, will apparently award a sticker, a semi-permanent piece of legislation representing the memory of our people. ![]() ![]() If we vote Yea, our kingdom’s prosperity will be harmed (because we don’t have any fresh millet), but morale will increase (because we’ve taken steps to safeguard our peasantry). Should we halt all trade with the Severines to stem the tide of millet larvae across our borders? Yea or Nay?Īt this point, we’re given a few glimpses of information. Unfortunately, the locusts seem to have made their way into our kingdom via the baskets of millet we imported from the Severine Kleptocracy. According to the farmer, swarms of locusts have invaded his fields, and the village is on the brink of total starvation. Here’s how a single round might play out as we draw a single card:Ī poor farmer supplicates the council on behalf of a negligible village a short distance outside of Brambleditch. To fix this problem, I will pretend to be a guest author for The King’s Dilemma. One of the inherent difficulties about critiquing legacy games is the need to talk about the game without spoiling any of the things that happen in it - a near impossibility when the game is functionally a sequence of paragraphs. ![]() One type of story told by The King’s Dilemma. ![]()
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