Base price: $45.
1 – 2 players.
Play time: ~45 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 4
Full disclosure: A review copy of It’s a Wonderful Kingdom was provided by Lucky Duck Games.
I think my friends are watching House of the Dragon at my place, tonight, so it seems appropriate to cover something fantasy-related on the site. I don’t really do Game of Thrones stuff, personally; just not my thing. More of a My Adventures With Superman-type, if we’re going off of the current season of TV. X-Men ’97 was great, too, but that’s since off the air. I digress. Fantasy is a well-trodden genre in the gaming space, but it’s somewhat rare to see a sci-fi game like It’s A Wonderful World retheme itself as a low fantasy game. So let’s see what It’s A Wonderful Kingdom is all about!
In It’s a Wonderful Kingdom, you want to rebuild the Kingdom which has fallen from grace, a bit. Something about giant rats. Maybe a Frost Giant? Unclear. Either way, you want to do this mostly for the benefit of the populace, but also because there’s a pretty good chance that if you do rebuild a mighty kingdom, they’ll install you as its leader. If you’re good at something, never do it for free and all that. However, your opponent also has designs on the throne, so they may attempt to thwart you for their own gains. It’s a thankless business, at times. Will you be able to rebuild the kingdom and take the throne? Or will you just end up a pretender?
Overall: 5.5 / 10
Overall, I wanted to like It’s A Wonderful Kingdom more than I did. I think that its predecessor, It’s A Wonderful World, is a smart and clever drafting game with a lot of cool mechanics. While It’s A Wonderful Kingdom preserves several of those things (particularly around how resources are gathered), adding in more take-that and an I-cut-you-choose mechanic ended up falling flat, for me. I already don’t like I-cut-you-choose as a mechanic (save for The Great Split, hence why these are paired up this week), so that almost never improves my experience when it’s added to a game. I kind of wish that they had gone for more of a Hokkaido approach and just had each player discard a card and add a new card to their hand for variety. With I-cut-you-choose came the addition of Calamity / Menace Cards, as well. These cards all have bad effects and you can place “Trap” tokens to hide them so that your opponent doesn’t necessarily know what they’re grabbing. There are also pure resource cards that can also be hidden so your opponent doesn’t get cool free stuff. Mechanically, fine, but there’s almost no reason to ever place your bad card face-up unless it’s next to a card you know your opponent needs, and even then they’d probably rather just stick you with the bad card. You end up with a 50-50 shot of something bad every time you see a face-down card, which doesn’t end up being a compelling experience for too long. This also leads to some issues with the BGA implementation, but that’s largely because I can’t remember which cards are my Traps and which are my opponent’s. That one’s on me. I will say, bafflingly, that the two packages of cards that came with the game are slightly different sizes, which is just a manufacturing goof. It’s almost unnoticeable, which … not great.
Otherwise, I had a fine time playing it. The implementation is similar enough to It’s A Wonderful World that the smart things, like the cards you play being able to generate their resources during the next phases (when relevant) continues to be stellar. I, unfortunately, find neither the theme nor the art particularly compelling, so I end up bouncing off the game on that front, too. It’s well-made art, but a lot of it is dark and gritty, which I feel nothing about. When the cards get a bit more high-fantasy it’s actually quite fun! But the majority of the game is a very-focused low fantasy, so I end up not as interested. You’ve seen one giant rat, you’ve kind of seen them all, you know? I still enjoy the strategic resource gameplay of the It’s A Wonderful … series, but this mostly just made me wish I were playing the original, to the point that I might go back and play the original soon. This isn’t to say that It’s a Wonderful Kingdom is bad or unplayable by any stretch: it just has two major mechanic choices that, for me, are serious downgrades from the original. If you like I-cut-you-choose, you want to punish your opponent with hard-hitting Menace Cards, or you just like low fantasy, however, this one might be for you!
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