King’s Coalition

• Designer: Derek Croxton
• Publisher: Play to Z
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3NvW2xt 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

The king is facing unrest and has fired his key advisors. Now, you have the opportunity to assemble a coalition of his subjects to take their place and bring peace to the kingdom. Will you unite the political power of an entire class, or perhaps build an alliance across the classes. As more subjects join the court, additional strategies may arise. You are aiming to score the highest points in your 7-card hand. Bonuses become globally available as well as collecting sets and sequences.

To set up the game, shuffle the deck of 64 Subjects cards and deal each player a hand of 7 cards.  Also, make a row of 6 face-down Subject cards on the table.  Beneath these cards, place the Set Bonus Card and the Sequence bonus card.  From the remainder of the bonus card deck, place 4 facedown at random in a row, and then place the four bonus tokens on them in descending value.

At the start of each round, the starting player will reveal the leftmost Subjects card as well as the the leftmost Bonus card (if there is still one facedown).  Then, each player will take a turn where they either Recruit and then Dismiss.

To RECRUIT – add a card to your hand, by choosing any face up Subject card on the table or drawing a card from the top of the Subjects deck.  There is a special rule for Peasant cards – if you choose it from the table, you can immediately Enlist it.  Instead of putting it in your hand, you can immediately put it face up on the table in your Coalition area.  They may not be Dismissed later in the game.  This Enlisted Peasant card counts as a card in your hand, and you do not Dismiss a card to end your turn.

If you did not Enlist a Peasant, you must Dismiss a card from your hand, placing it face up on the table into the Recruitment Area.  

When all players have taken a turn, the round ends.  The First Player token is passed to the next player clockwise and another round is played.  If this is the end of the 6th round, the game ends and scoring occurs.

Players score points for the sum of the face value of all the cards in their hand as well as in their Coalition Area.  Players will also score points for bonuses:

• Set Bonus – Bonus points for 3+ cards of the same class
• Sequence Bonus – score for a consecutive run of 6+ card values 
• Score the other 4 Bonus cards which were revealed during the game

Note that the Minister cards each have special abilities which can affect your scoring. The player with the highest score wins. Ties broken in favor of the lowest sum of face value on their cards.

Once you are familiar with the game, you can add in the special effects of the different classes.

• Artisans – if you have one in your hand, you can use your turn to Enlist an Artisan from the table (as if it were a Peasant)
• Gentry – instead of your turn, dismiss two Gentry cards to take any two cards from the table/deck
• Knights – at the end of the game, a Knight can appoint another card to become a Knight for scoring purposes
• Nobles – instead of your turn, dismiss a Noble and any other card to take any two cards from the table/deck
• Merchants – if a Merchant is in a sequence, it adds +5 points to the bonus
• Clergy – if you score a Set of Clergy cards, score it as if the set has one more card

My thoughts on the game

King’s Coalition is a quick hitting game where you take your starting hand and then modify it over six rounds to get the best score.  For the most part, you can only change one card per round in the game, so you definitely need to use your starting hand as the base for your plan. 

If you add in the special abilities of the different classes, you’ll have a number of different options; as the Recruitment area will grow in size by one card each time someone draws from the Recruit deck on their turn.

At the start of each of round 2-5, you’ll also see a new Bonus card which might also change your strategies as you learn a new rule each round as to what would score points.  As you can see, the whole game is fluid and you’ll constantly be reassessing your plan as you see the new cards on the table and the new bonus cards available to you.

While you are considering the four bonuses, don’t forget that the face value of the cards also scores for you… As great as it is to spend much of the game working towards the 20 pt bonus card; a pair of 11s will earn you more points.  As you can probably tell, there will be a lot of different things to try to consider as you’re looking for the card that best suits your needs on a turn.

Each player’s turn should be quick, though in the final round or 2, you might have to go over a number of different options based on the cards you have in your hand and the special effects of each type…  The whole game should take twenty to thirty minutes tops.

If you like Fantasy Realms, this will probably scratch that same itch – though the cards and card effects are different, so there’s room for both in your collection.  Here, you’re working on sets and runs more so than specific interactions between cards; yet it feels oddly familiar with the general draw one, discard one process to improve your hand.   

I’d definitely recommend taking the game for a test run – the rules make the game seem more complicated than it needs to be.  As you read the rules for the first time, you get bogged down in all the rules about enlistment of peasants – and this is before you know what anything else does!  It might have been easier to just say [Enlistment can happen here – see Peasant, page 6] and then explain the somewhat complicated rules later… But, trust me, once you get the hang of it, the rule is actually quite simple.

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3NvW2xt  

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it.
• Neutral. Dale Y, John P
• Not for me… Mark Jackson