From the four corners of the land come four pretenders to the throne, each claiming to be the rightful heir. As the four would-be Kings march towards the capitol, they gather their armies, preparing for battle.
One comes for Glory. One comes for Greed. One comes for Blood. One comes for Honor.
Will you summon the strongest army? Will you be the first to take the capitol? Will your magic outwit your opponents? Will you be the last King standing?
So started the www.kickstarter.com campaign for King Down in 2015.
“King Down is an epic strategy game for 2-4 players, where each player allies themselves with one King, hand picks their army and goes into battle by competing to take down the other Kings and cross the board to victory,” noted the campaign.
When I delved into the game a bit farther it was obvious King Down was born out of chess, and that is usually a positive in my books.
The game was created by Saar Shai, who I actually interviewed regarding his game ‘The Agents’ some time ago, a game which employs some great mechanics and really excelled beyond expectation.
So that only added to my hope King Down would be a winner.
The aforementioned kickstarted effort saw 2,300 pledge just more than $200K to get the game launched, so there was some pre-publishing buzz too.
But games do not always live up to expectations.
King Down is one such game.
The pieces, while visually nice, ended up smaller than I had anticipated.
The nicest chess sets have large, heavy pieces, and with the unique design here I was hoping it would double as a great basic chess too. It didn’t turn out that way.
Some of the associated boards, not the main play area, but those where pieces are marshalled etc, have developed a significant bow too, even though stored in the rather stout box which comes with the game. Again that disappoints.
Game play though should be the ultimate measure of a game.
My son and I played and came away feeling we would have enjoyed the session playing chess.
Now King Down does allow for two-to-four players, and that is something regular chess does not, but that feature would not be omen to recommend the game on. Generally, multi-player, chess-like games falter from the problem of one player ultimately being ganged up on. The issue of balance is just hard to achieve.
So this was one game that grabbed my attention for a number of reasons, but simply fell short of what I was hoping it would be.
