Kingdomino: Age of Giants board game review

Suppose you’re relaxing in your castle or exploring the beauty of your kingdom (minding your own kingly business) when all of a sudden, a huge giant stomps through your field. Would you be scared, upset, or angry?

Would it make a difference if you knew that giant wandered into your kingdom because your rival kingdom sent him your way? I bet you’d start looking for ways to send him right back!

Thats just the way it goes in Kingdomino: Age of Giants – an expansion game for either Kingdomino or Queendomino.

With Gen Con 2018 taking place this week, we’re excited to review 3 family board games from Blue Orange Games releasing at Gen Con. Blue Orange Games makes such fantastic games for families. And those we’re reviewing this week are no different.

And the first on our docket is Kingdomino: Age of Giants!

 

How to play Kingdomino: Age of Giants

If you’re unfamiliar with Kingdomino or Queendomino, quickly take a look at our reviews of each game. They’re fantastic tile-placing games for families. The names are similar because the game play is based on the same methods. Players draft domino-style tiles and place them in their growing kingdom. And the Age of Giants expansion can be played with either Kingdomino or Queendomino.

Let’s dive into the unique elements Age of Giants adds to each game.

Age of Giants adds the option to have 5 players as well as a few new elements to the game. While they don’t really add complexity to the game, they do add more interaction between the players.

 

Giants

The first addition relates directly to the name of the game – GIANTS.

The expansion comes with 12 new tiles that get shuffled in with the standard set of tiles. Six of these tiles have an image of a giant on them and the other six tiles have Giant Footprints. The tiles with Giants are labeled A-F. When they’re drawn, they’re placed above the numbered tiles. The tiles with the Giants Footprints are numbered 49-54 and thus will always be at the bottom of the column when new tiles come out.

When a player claims a tile with a Giant, it means a Giant has invaded their kingdom. Once they add the tile to their kingdom (following normal placement rules), they take a Giant figure and cover up one of the Crown symbols in their kingdom. At the end of the game, any Crown covered by a Giant doesn’t score!

When a player claims a tile with Giant Footprints, after adding it to their kingdom, they can remove a Giant figure from their kingdom and give it to another player. That player then chooses one of their Crowns to cover with the Giant.

 

Challenge Tiles

The other addition to the game is 17 Challenge Tiles.

At the beginning of the game, players randomly draw 2 Challenge Tiles which provide additional ways to score points at the end of the game. In addition to standard tile scoring (number of Crowns multiplied by number of connected terrain spaces), players will score bonus points indicated by the selected challenge tiles.

Some examples are: 5 bonus points for each square of a certain terrain located around the castle, 5 bonus points for each square of a certain type in the corners of the kingdom, 10 points if the castle is in the exact center of the kingdom, 20 points if the castle is in a corner of the kingdom, and more.

The symbols on the Challenge Tiles show how they score, but players can also refer to the rulebook as well.

 

Tile Dispenser

Another cool addition to the game doesn’t impact the game play or scoring at all. It’s the tile dispenser and it’s super sweet!

Rather than pulling tiles from the box each round, at the beginning of the game all the shuffled terrain tiles are stacked inside the tile dispenser. Each round, players pull the next tiles out from the bottom of the dispenser and then order them as normal for the tile selection stage of the round.

We all agree that the dispenser is a very cool addition.

Also, in Age of Giants, because of the 12 additional tiles added to every game, players draw 5 tiles each round. If there are less than 5 players in the game, some of those placed tiles will be removed. In a 2- or 4-player game, the center tile is removed. In a 3-player game the 2nd and 4th tile are removed.

 

Can the whole family enjoy Kingdomino: Age of Giants?

As you might expect, our answer here is a huge, YES!

If your family enjoys Kingdomino or Queendomino we recommend picking up a copy of the Age of Giants expansion.

Another great thing about it is that it’s easy to separate the expansion tiles from the normal tiles at the end of any game. So if you don’t want to include them in the next game, you don’t have to.

Age of Giants gives you a great option to increase the player interaction during a game. The player interaction of the original Kingdomino lies in the tile selection at the start of each round. Which tile one player chooses means another player won’t be able to get it.

But Age of Giants adds more direct conflict by sending your Giants to your opponents’ kingdoms.

Yet, even in that, the game isn’t too mean because the player who gets the Giant gets to choose which of their crowns he covers up.

So players with Giants will be trying to grab the Footsteps tiles when they appear. These tiles also have many crowns. So not only can they get rid of a Giant, but they also get many crowns. The catch is that those are the high numbered tiles and as such will be at the bottom of the column when choosing tiles. So the player who picks one will choose tiles last in the next round.

Everything comes with a tradeoff.

And that’s why we love Kingdomino and Queendomino. The rules are simple. The game play goes quickly. The choices are interesting every round. And our kingdoms look cool at the end of the game (even if we don’t win).

 

How does Kingdomino: Age of Giants score on our “Let’s Play Again” game meter?

Both Kingdomino and Queendomino score high on our “let’s play again” game meter. And Kingdomino: Age of Giants makes both games even more replayable.

The variable bonus scoring through Challenge Tiles is a big reason for that.

Even though the game flow and basic scoring strategy is the same, with different ways to get bonuses each game plays out differently. Depending on the challenge tiles in play, certain terrain tiles may be a lot more valuable than others from game to game. And that makes choosing tiles at the start of each round a bit more interesting.

While we enjoy the simplicity of building our own kingdoms, we also like the added player interaction the Giants bring to the mix. I’m pretty sure we’re going to include Age of Giants every time we play Kingdomino or Queendomino from here on out.

We’d like to thank Blue Orange Games for a review copy of Kingdomino: Age of Giants.