Lords of Worlds

• Designer: Michael Kiesling, Wolfgang Kramer
• Publisher: Mojito Studios
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 12+
• Time: 45-60 mins
•  Played with review copy provided by publisher

In Lords of Worlds, players compete to create the most valuable world by purchasing various types of terrain tiles and adding them to their personal planet.  Hire various assistants and utilize them wisely to secure optimal deals, then follow the instructions of your architects to ensure the construction of a gorgeous land!

In Lord of Worlds, you collect Terrain tiles and add them to your Planet trying to create chains of tiles of the same type: the longer a chain is, the more Victory points it will be worth at the end of the game. On your turn, you can either:

– Hire Assistants, adding cards to your hand
OR
– Play cards you have in your hand and use them to Move your Cart and/or Collect a tile.

The game has different ending conditions, depending on the number of players. When any of the ending conditions is met, conclude the current round, so that each player plays the same amount of turns. The player with the most Victory Points is the winner.

To set up, assemble the game board for the player count, covering the spaces with tiles of the directed number of types (again based on player count).  In the strategic version, which is what we play most often, cover every non-portal space with a face up terrain.  For the regular version, place these tiles face down, and then reveal 12 at random.  The first player chooses which of the portals is the starting space, and all players place their cart on that space.

Then, shuffle the Assistant card deck and make the display.  Every time you make the display, you continue until you get 6 piles.  Place cards of the same color in a single pile, though you stop adding if the sum of the cards in the pile is 8 or more.  You immediately stop when you make the 6th pile, so that the final pile is always comprised of a single card.

Players also draw their starting hand by taking cards from the deck until the total of the cards in their hand is 14 or more.

On a turn, the active player can either Hire Assistants or play cards to do something on the board.  I will describe the rules to the strategic variant here.  There is a more basic luck-oriented game as well.

To hire assistants, choose any one of the piles of cards and add them to your hand. Your hand is limited to 10 cards at the end of your turn.  Then replenish the card supply as above.

If you play cards, you will Move, Collect, or Move and Collect.  To move, it costs one per space moved, and one to move through a portal (ending movement on any space on the board).  To collect, you must pay the number shown on the tile.  When you play cards, you must play cards of a single color (though wild cards can be added as stand ins for that color).   If you are collecting a tile from a colored board hex, you must play cards that match the board space – and when you do this, you score a 5VP bonus immediately. 

The collected tile is now played onto the player’s personal Planet board. You can place it on any empty hex or a hex with an Architect.  If you play on an Architect, you immediately score points equal to the number on the tile.  If you play on an Empty space, you score nothing, but then you are allowed to move your cart to any adjacent space and collect that terrain tile for free and place it.  You only get to do this free collection once per turn.

There are 4 special tiles that you could choose:

• Architect – this essentially adds another Architect space to your planet.  Alternatively, if you play it on top of an Architect, you score the new tile.
• Mix – it is a wild terrain, but the type does not have to be fixed until the final scoring
• Sage Tree – immediately scores 3 VPs for each tile adjacent to it at the moment it is placed
• Viewpoint – Scores 2VP per tile in the largest terrain chain adjacent to it

The game continues until a player has triggered the end of the game – in a 4p game, this is having 4 or fewer unfilled hexes on their player board.  The current round is continued so that all players get the same number of turns, and then the game moves into final scoring.

• For each terrain, calculate the number of tiles in the chain and then score based on the chart on the scoreboard
• For each tile rank, score if you have 3+ of that particular value of tile anywhere on your board

The player with the most points wins. There is no tiebreaker

My thoughts on the game

As I was wandering the halls of Spiel 2025, I was quite surprised to find a Kramer and Kiesling game that I hadn’t known about before!  After a short demo, I was definitely interested in giving this one a try.  As I have come to expect with most Kramer designs, there are multiple variations of the game offered in the rules – our group chose for the first game to play the Strategic Variant, and we’ve never tried anything else.  (For those that don’t read my reviews a lot, this is one of my big sticking points with Kramer designs – I really dislike the way that multiple variants are generally in the rules; I’d much prefer the game to have a single best version in the rules.)

In Lords of Worlds, there is a nice back and forth in your turns where you accumulate cards when you can, hoping to have the right cards to then take advantage of the board situation.  Most times, taking the cards with the highest total is the best play, though you’ll always want to keep an eye on piles of specific colors if you’re going to a particular tile on a colored hex on the board.  

It’s important to keep an eye on what other players are collecting (and trying to remember what cards they have recently picked up) – even if you might be able to collect a desired tile on your turn, it might be worthwhile to push your luck and pick up a nice juicy stack of cards.  Alternatively, sometimes you might want to postpone picking up a particular tile on the board as you wait for better tiles to come up in the market (because there isn’t a decent tile adjacent to your desired board tile).

In general, most of the turns involve choosing a low tile to place on a plain spot on your board and then taking a higher numbered tile for free to then place on an Architect to score.  It felt like a weird loophole on our first game, but this obvious strategy seems to be what every new player settles on – so it appears to be a feature not a bug.

The bulk of the interaction in the game is the indirect competition for stacks of cards and for picking up tiles from the board.  Otherwise, you’re putting tiles on your personal board and once placed there, no one else can mess with them.

The components all work fine.  It was a little weird to have to figure out that the grey cards were the wild cards (we didn’t easily find this information in the rules and usually the cards of all colors tend not to be the drab grey color).  Also, the single scoring board would have been much better if converted to four player aids.  The vital scoring charts are hard to read from the other side of the table; and having easy access to this information would be really helpful for players to weigh their options as well as to remind themselves how the special tiles score.

Lords of Worlds is an abstract game at heart, and I do like the challenge in the strategic variant as you get to plan out your strategy over the course of the game.  You know from the start which colors and numbers are available on the board – though there are still plenty of opportunities for surprises to come up in the tile market.  The amount of luck variance in the “discovery” of tiles in the basic version sounds distinctly unappealing to me, and I’m likely to not try it.  This is the downside of multiple games in the rulebook – I might choose a different version to play than you, and we might both like the game but not actually be playing the same game.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

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