To Forge a Realm (POWER GRID Problems)

   The "To Forge a Realm" game expansion for "Kingsburg," by Stratelibri and Fantasy Flight Games, arrived today. Five new modules are added to the base game, including not only new rows of buildings to build along the technology tree, but additional rows that you can choose to replace preexisting rows, variable player powers, special conditions, and an all-new system of determining reinforcements at the end of the year when the kingdom is besieged by dangerous threats. So much variability is added to the game.

Behold. (Via Fantasy Flight Games.)

   Kingsburg is a great game, but, I wouldn't be making a post just on it if there weren't a "but." Kingsburg is a great game, but there's really not much in the base set to prevent it from getting stale. The same stuff happens each game, each season... you influence the king's advisers, you collect your resources, you build your buildings, and you fight your monsters. The only thing that changes from game to game is which monsters come at the end of the year, and there's only so much variability in those. You can choose to build your buildings in a different order, sometimes you roll poorly, and sometimes people influence advisers that you'd like to have been the one to influence for the season (which requires you to modify your strategy,) but other than that each game plays out the same.

   That's what Alex says baffles him about the popularity of the game "Power Grid": once you've played one game of it, you may as well quit, because there's not really much replayability. Different maps you can choose to play with, sure, and different orders of opportunity with which the power plants present themselves, sure, but the game remains basically exactly the same, with replay value next to nil. He'd be happy to play if someone else owned the game, but he'd never consider buying a copy for himself. As light-and-casual yet strategic Kingsburg is, it suffered from the same problems as Power Grid: the underlying strategy is always going to remain static from game to game, with little thought needed how to achieve victory.

   With Kingsburg: To Forge a Realm, though, after one game (and not even all of the modules!) it was clear that Kingsburg was jumping up back to its previous high position on Alex's list of his top tabletop and cardgames (it had slipped lower and lower as he became aware of the replayability issue.) It's even getting higher now than it previously had been.

   So yeah.