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I'm not immune to hype. I watched Shut Up and Sit Down's video review of The King's Dilemma and sent a link to my son, Tad. He messaged me and said he would go half on it, if I would pick it up from Miniature Market. Knowing I would have a full compliment of Hobby Game players around for what was about a month straight for Christmas Break (and hearing how the SUSD gang were knocking out three or four games of it per session), I, obviously, said yes.
The King's Dilemma has you playing as members of the King's inner circle. The idea of going full Game of Thrones by pulling strings and hatching schemes in a legacy power struggle with light role playing and branching narratives (besides being a mouthful) seemed to hit all the right notes for me.
The most successful Legacy board games are the ones based on the foundation of tried and true, Good/Great Boardgames: Risk Legacy, Pandemic Legacy, Clank! Legacy. The problem is that that “Game” part of The King's Dilemma isn't really fun. You start with the Leader and each player, on their turn, bid Power on a Aye or Nay vote for the current dilemma. If that bid is the new high bid, they seize Leader designation. The first player to pass becomes Moderator; Subsequent players can pass to gather power. Bidding continues around to current leader. Highest total Power bid, Aye or Nay, wins the vote. The Moderator breaks ties. The losing side reclaims all their Power they bid and the Winning side spend all the Power that they had bid. Throw in some binding bribery and that pretty much sums it up. But it's not really a “game,” it's a mechanism to get to new dilemmas to debate. And the resource tracker for Influence, Wealth, Morale, Welfare, Knowledge and Stability are mostly abstract things you need to manipulate towards your round goals of the Agenda Cards. Tanking Wealth doesn't bankrupt the kingdom and having high knowledge doesn't improve the education or intelligence of the populace. It's hard to push ”Every decision we make has an impact.” when every decision you make in the “Game” portion of the game, well, doesn't. The narrative never changes based on who wins or loses a round or if a King dies of old age or has to abdicate.
We played with five players/factions, the universally accepted as “Best at this number of players” for King's Dilemma. I think we further upped the ante when three of our five players were experienced RPG players. The factions you pick are given a back story that is supposed to guide you on votes. However, they vaguely hint at your end all, be all family/faction goal. So, maybe it's supposed to be fun to sus out which Dilemma card, or series of cards, might be linked to that. We had issues (This isn't an actual dilemma in the game but should give you an idea of what sort of issues you can run into). Let's say a player selects a Faction that values the conquest of enemies. But then they run across a dilemma that involves trying to enslave a adjoining country. If the conquest player decides they want no part of making literal slaves of an entire race, playing the faction instead as noble warriors who would defend the kingdom at any cost... who were we to tell them they were playing it “wrong?”
There are many times where your character's goals and your secret agenda/round goals do not match up. Even worse is when what you want to do as a player doesn't match up to any of them. There were plenty of times I had to decide if I wanted to pursue what I thought my faction would want when it was at odds with my round Agenda. Or I could simply pass on this “Dilemma” and conserve power for one I felt would be something my Faction would pursue. It's effective but boring...even when role playing that I did have a definite position to try to attract bribes from other players.
I've mentioned “Goals” a few times in this review already but one of the issues we had in the game was we had no idea what the Ultimate Goal of the game is. This is kept vague for “reasons” but players want to know if they are “winning” or “losing” especially when putting in multiple hours over various play sessions. “Prestige” looks like the default Victory Points (they are white and look positive) and “Crave” points, which, come on, is the root of Craven and feels negative. It's a real reach for players to commit to, what could be, a horrible strategy by fully going for Prestige OR Crave points. Still, everyone seemed to gravitate to leaning into Prestige. And role playing an entire round just so that you can put a check mark into a box or two on your player board felt stiff and, again, unrewarding.
I really feel this lack of direction to what the players are supposed to be trying to achieve overall and the lack of knowing if they are “winning” or “losing” led to another problem. There were times when a player would not have placed a sticker or signed a card for a couple of games and would bid the shit out of dilemma. Not because it aligned with their faction or advanced something they thought should be advanced but just because they wanted to place a sticker just to feel like they achieved something.
Our “Campaign” of The King's Dilemma slowly sputtered to a stop, with questions of “Do you want to play King's Dilemma on game night?” receiving a luke cold response of “Not Really.” Even Tad, who had “won” the most rounds of it had lost interest. My copy of The King's Dilemma has been sitting, untouched, on my shelves for close to four years. I don't have any hope we will ever go back to it. Honestly, I also have no real urge to bring it back out. I have no idea what to do with it. You can't really resell a half-done Legacy game and opening up the remaining envelopes to read a story seems a weird way to get “Closure.” Maybe I should buy a shadowbox and display it as “My Dilemma” in the dusty recesses of my board game closet.
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