The Old King’s Crown review

Once in a while, a truly unique board game comes along that grabs you by the unmentionables and just won’t let go. The kind of board game you finish playing at 11pm and genuinely consider racking up another 3-hour playthrough of right away. The kind you go to bed thinking about, and wake up again still wanting to play. The Old King’s Crown is one of these, and explaining that to you in this review is a privilege I find both delicious and daunting.

The Old King’s Crown is a rather strange creature. It’s absolutely one of the best strategy board games of all time, and one cursory glance at the sumptuous box art tells you it’s also one of the prettiest. Beneath the surface, its gameplay is just as beguiling – but it might not seem that way to begin with. At first glance, this game is as arcane and inscrutable as the fractured, dreamlike fantasy world depicted on its cards. But if you persevere, you’ll discover something truly special.

You might find some of my thoughts on TOKC a trifle overdramatic and gushy, and that’s fine. That’s the reaction I had to some other reviews before I played the game; it’s just a box full of cardboard, paper, and bits of wood, after all. But I’m going on record, right now, saying that even veteran gamers will charge into their first game of this and get bonked on the head with a mixture of rapt, aesthetic wonder and utter discombobulation. It’s like waking up in fairyland, surrounded by purple trees and impossible castles, having no clue where to go or what to do, but knowing only one thing: you never want to leave.

We fans of board games just love to categorize, but when you try and slap a gameplay category label on TOKC, it just slides off, or bursts into flames, or sprouts wings and flies away. There are just too many layers to this onion for any one of them to properly describe the whole. So, in this review, I’m going to try and pick out each of those layers, tell you about them, and then explain, as best I can, how they’re woven together into a game that somehow scratches all my tabletop itches at once.

So what is The Old King’s Crown? Per the Gamefound campaign preview page for its impending second printing (and expansion, which I will most certainly be getting), “The Old King’s Crown is a 1-4 player, large-scale strategy board game of skill and intrigue, set in an ancient, crumbling kingdom, where every card is a window into a fantastical land”.

That’s accurate in essentials. But, as is always the case when summarizing something achingly massive in a handful of words, it’s also insufficient. It’s like describing a fire breathing dragon as ‘a large, winged animal’, or the Taj Mahal as ‘a larger than average building with towers’.

In describing this game fully, it’s tempting to start with the art – and oh, you’d better believe we’ll get to that art – but first, I’m going to tackle the more complex question: what’s it like to play?

How does The Old King’s Crown play?

OK, deep breath. Pack your things, we’re going on a bit of a journey here. So, like I said, TOKC is a many-layered machine, and understanding it means going bit by bit. We’ll start in the very middle. At its heart is a bluffing card game, quite similar to the combat phase of Magic: The Gathering or most other TCGs.

You draw a hand of different numbered cards from your deck; you each lay down a card face down; you flip them over, and they compete in a ‘Clash’ where the highest card wins. Winning these gets you Influence (victory points), and the most Influence at the end of the game wins.

Again like Magic-style games, some cards have special abilities. Deadly ignores the card values and kills everything on the other side that doesn’t have one of two protective keywords, Resilient and Invulnerable. Ambush lets you sub in another card from your hand to support the fight, after your opponent reveals their card. Retreat lets you return the card to your hand after the flip, if you know you’ve lost that fight and need to keep it for later use.

Continuing the MTG comparison, hand management is important. Cards defeated in Clashes usually get discarded, or even removed from the game, and you’ll have to plan beyond the current round for which cards you’ll need next time. Thus far, though, it’s still Top Trumps with a bit of extra juice, so let’s take a step outwards to the next layer.

That first step is easy enough: just multiply that by three! Most of TOKC’s board is taken up with a grid of six printed Locations, arranged in three rows of two, with each row called a Region. In every round of the game, you’ll set up and play three Clashes – one in each Region.

Meeples get involved here too. A large one, your Herald, can be placed in one Location each round and grants you one extra Influence if you win the Clash. Your five single-use Supporters can be placed in any Region, and each adds one to your card’s value in the battle there.

Now you’re not just sending one card into battle, but three; placing troops to bolster some fights; and betting on which fight you’ll win. Why does that matter? What difference do the Regions make? Time to go up another layer – and this is where the fun begins.

The things you’ll do

Each of the six Locations – the Castle, Wilderness, Harvest Field, Battlefield, Shrine, and Necropolis – has a unique reward text printed on it, alongside an Influence reward. Each time you win a Clash in a Region, you get to choose one of its two Locations, collect the marked VP, and trigger its written effect too.

Before I even explain what those rewards do, we’ve already got more tactics and deduction bubbling up underneath the bluffing cardplay. Which of the board’s three battlegrounds is your opponent gunning for? Where will they put their strongest cards, and where are they vulnerable? You’ll need to think about that a lot – and the answer won’t be simple.

Because it’s those Location effects that drag us up, kicking and screaming, into the biggest layer of all: the actual board game part of this board game. Wrapped snugly around TOKC’s central card battles is a whole, harmonious family of engine building board game mechanics to engage in, and which Locations you win Clashes in determines which strategic avenues you’ll get to take an extra step along.

Each can help you lend more power to future clashes, and earn more winning Influence – but, while some help you save precious cards, others cost them. Choosing which to shoot for, and when, is the core strategic challenge here.

The places you’ll go

Let’s take a tour through those six key Locations and their attractions. The bottom two offer different flavors of hand management chicanery! Winning the Shrine lets you take active cards from the board or your hand, and use them to top up your deck. That’s important because, once you’re out of cards to draw, your maximum hand size starts to shrink.

Winning the Necropolis is even simpler: it lets you shuffle up your discard pile and rescue three cards back to your hand. Keeping as many different cards in your hand as you can, for as long as you can, is an easily overlooked but crucial priority in TOKC, so don’t sleep on the bottom row.

Up in the top row, in the Castle and the Wilderness, we find the real engine building equipment.

There’s a bit of worker placement! Win the Castle, and you get to Govern, sending one of your cards away to one of three councils, each of which grants you a bonus based on the quantity (and quality) of cards you put there. Higher numbered cards also tend to bear more of the little ‘vote’ symbols that juice up said bonus – so you have to decide whether to keep them as elite troops, or send them as politicians to strengthen your hand later on.

There’s a bit of deck building! Win the Wilderness, and you send a card on a Journey, dumping them out of the game in exchange for Lore tokens, which you can trade for powerful new cards to add to your hand.

Finally, in the middle you’ll find the Battlefield (which triggers no mechanics, but grants two Influence instead of the usual one) and the Harvest Field, complete with compulsory windmill.

The bonus there is my personal favorite bit of the whole game: the little black and gold wooden disc known as the Kingdom’s Favor. But to explain that (and those powerful new cards, too) we need to step up to the next layer again.

The people you’ll meet

It’s time to talk about the factions. TOKC has four, each with their own color scheme: the stolid, aristocratic Nobility in blue; the aggressive, flighty Clans in green; the scheming revolutionaries of the Uprising in red (of course), and the crafty cultists of the Gathering in spooky purple. Each player picks one, and with it comes a player board, deck of cards, and two kinds of wooden meeples, all separately colored and decorated according to its faction’s theme.

There is asymmetry in this game – but only partly. Each faction’s starting deck is mechanically identical, differing in style only (I’ll come onto why that’s genius in a bit). The optional upgrade cards, however – the ones that cost lore, and require investment – are different for each faction, and support subtly different playstyles. Some are regular, numbered cards with better stats and effects, but there are also HQ cards: landscape formatted towns or buildings that add new passive bonuses or activated abilities to your arsenal.

They’re supported by unique faction abilities called Tactics, which sit at the bottom of your player board on cute little tiles. Most are single use; some you can fire off a few times; all have the potential to be hugely powerful when used at the right time. The Uprising, for instance, can use False Orders to swap two of an opponent’s active cards before they’re flipped face up in a Clash, or launch Night Raids to force an opponent to discard vital cards from their hand – those sneaky fantasy Marxists!

And that Kingdom’s Favor disc adds the last flavorsome flourish to the faction soup: it slots neatly into the top of your player board and opens up another faction specific ability. With each use, you rotate it to count down, and after three uses it returns to the field.

Like literally every tactical option in TOKC, the Kingdom’s Favor abilities are both very powerful and situationally limited. And, like almost everything in the game, you can lose that power as easily as you gain it. If an opponent wins the Harvest Field next Clash, they become the public’s new champion and steal the disc from you!

We’re now beginning to get a sense of the feast of interlocking strategic treats on offer in TOKC. Your faction gives you a theme and a unique toolkit, some parts needing to be earned before use. You’ll fight over territories because winning fights earns you VP, but you’ll decide which territories to try and win based on your broader plan.

And all of it, all the time, piles more tension onto to that ever present card game of bluffs and ploys in the center of the board. As each round passes, your growing hoard of intuited information about your rivals adds new variables to your uneasy, crown-wearing head. That pressure keeps on building, making each new Clash feel more and more fraught with danger, intrigue, and suspense, right to the end.

So, what if I told you we weren’t done yet, and that we haven’t even covered my second favorite thing in the game – the bit I think is TOKC’s biggest source of replayability? We’ve reached the final layer now. We’re nearly there. It’s all right.

Behold, your stuff!

Zoom out a little further from TOKC’s rather large board, and you can finally see the last two elements in its ingenious formula. I’ve saved them until last for two reasons. Partly, it’s because they’re not quite as complex to explain as the rest, and they sit outside the direct orbit of the Clashes. But mostly it’s because, between them, they’re what ties this whole show together into such an impressively cohesive game, and makes me want to play it over and over and over again.

I’ll turn to the Kingdom Cards first. These are, functionally, upgrade items you can acquire that grant you various passive bonuses and active abilities that can accelerate part of a strategy, turn the tide in a Clash, or sometimes both. They sit in a shared ‘market’ at the top of the board, and each round, you’ll compete for first pick of which to add to your side. Some are fantasy items like war horns, shields, helmets, or swords; others are allied characters; others are goddamned abstract concepts. TOKC is not a fantasy world anchored in reality, and we’ll come to that.

There are two more important and interesting things to mention about them, though. Firstly, all of them (or at least the 20 or so I’ve seen, and I’ll die before I spoil the rest for myself) are nuggets of brilliant design. Each one is wildly tempting and seemingly powerful, but obviously and deliberately limited to specific use cases you’ll need to plan for. Yet another scrumptious strategic decision point to add to your game plan.

And, secondly, there are 51 of them, but you’ll never see even half of them in a single game, and usually far fewer. The market row shows four; each player can only claim one in each of the game’s five rounds, and (with one very limited exception) can only hold two of them at a time.

Simple math, and designer Pablo Clark’s masterful eye for where to elevate players’ experience by limiting their choices, turn that 51-card deck from a pile of forgettable bolt-ons into a tantalizing pool of possibilities.

The best of times

Which brings me to the last, essential bit of the jigsaw: the framework underneath everything I’ve talked about so far. The basic foundation of any board game, and the least sexy, most yawn-inducing part of every teach. I’m talking, of course, about the turn structure – except that in TOKC, it’s not boring and it is sexy.

The true catalyst that brings every part of TOKC to life, making every single decision feel tense, meaningful, and final, is time. The game is played in five rounds; each round is a year; each year has four seasons; and every single action you can take in the game has its proper and appointed season.

Each year (round) starts with Spring, when – strictly in order – you’ll bid for Kingdom Cards, place your Herald on a Location, and lay your face down cards for the Clashes. A host of abilities in the form of Faction cards, Tactics, Kingdom cards, and the Kingdom’s Favor can only be activated in Spring.

Then it’s Summer – time for Clashing! But, in true TCG combat style, the Clash has ordered sub phases – Day and Night – before you resolve the winner. Those ‘free’ Govern and Journey actions happen in Summer, right after you win the Clash.

In Autumn (Fall, but the game was designed in Scotland) each player gets their regular opportunity to Journey and Govern once each. But again, there’s a whole range of Autumn specific actions strewn across different bits of the game that you might want to do too.

Finally, in Winter, we clean up: active cards and pieces that can be retained are welcomed home, and everything else is swept away to Discard and Lost piles, ready for next year. Even Winter has a few timed mechanical effects to trigger, though they don’t come up often.

So it’s got turns and phases, so what? I’ll tell you what. First, the obvious: a fixed structure and order of operations forces you to think, plan, and consider your actions carefully at all times. Every opportunity taken is another missed, but, more than that, many key opportunities come but once a year, making each one feel properly weighty.

Second, basing your game on a rigid, limiting framework opens up acres of design freedom to make things interesting by bending that framework. That principle – give the player a rigid rule, make it count, make them afraid of it, then give them ways to break it – is what makes every strategic option or sparkly upgrade in TOKC seem so powerful and tempting. And the game is full of them.

Take Clashes, for example. Remember Deadly, the card ability that auto-kills everything on the other side? That only triggers in the Night sub phase – but what if you trigger an ability in the preceding day phase that pulls your cards out of harm’s way? Or makes them immune? Or switches off the Night and Day sub phases altogether? All those options exist, in Kingdom Cards and factions’ Tactics, and other places too.

Autumn is about investing cards in engine building, sure – but it’s also a mad rush to save your cards and Supporters from the discard doom that awaits them. The game says Winter is coming, and your people are going to die – but then gives you tools to save them.

Maybe you’ve played a card with a strong Rally ability, able to smuggle itself and others back into your hand, or one with Deploy, that settles in early, ready to fight in the following round’s Clash. Maybe you’ve got cards in the Council of Oaths, letting you rescue Supporters from oblivion – or maybe you’re the Nobility, and can use School of the Stones to keep them where they are for another year.

There’s more, believe me, there’s so much more. But we’ve climbed through all the layers now, and all that’s left to say is this: I’ve never played a game quite like TOKC. Its influences are clear, of course, with Leder Games’ world leading strategy games first among them. The faction setups owe something to Root, released back in 2018, and the Councils strongly recall the Court system in 2024’s Arcs.

No surprises there, as Clark personally thanks Leder Games’ Cole Wehrle, Nick Brachmann, and Patrick Leder for their “help and direction” in the manual’s acknowledgments. The Clashes share a lot with MTG, and especially with slimmed down pretenders like Marvel SNAP.

But TOKC’s peculiar, pitch perfect orchestration of all its elements makes it play like nothing else. It passes every test I can think of, including one of the toughest: it’s fun to lose. My wife has beaten me in every game so far, and I loved every minute.

Even if it were just a themeless working model made of plain numbers and words on grey cardboard, this game would still be a mechanical marvel, especially considering it’s a 12 year labor of love by one single person.

It isn’t themeless, though, not even close. Because that same one person also singlehandedly illustrated every inch of cardboard in this box with the most brilliant artworks I’ve seen in a board game, ever. That’s right, you can relax, the brainy part is over, and it’s finally time to talk about how unfeasibly incredible this game looks.

How does the Old King’s Crown look and feel?

Honestly, where it took over 2,500 words to explain the gameplay, this is one outstanding feature of TOKC that speaks for itself. It’s bewilderingly gorgeous. It’s simply the most enjoyment my eyes have had from a board game in my nearly 33 trips round the Sun.

Everywhere you look in this game, there’s another effortlessly asborbing piece of artistic flair, rendered in a vivid, anime-esque fantasy style that’s instantly recognizable yet refreshingly new. There are hefty dollops of Studio Ghibli and Zelda: Breath of the Wild here, yes – but they’re given hard edges and threatening shadows by a generous dash of Hades and Darkest Dungeon.

TOKC’s artistic spectrum might have bright blue skies, sunlit fields, and happy little gnomes at one end, but at the other are impressionistic nether realms and nightmare creatures that wouldn’t be out of place in Warhammer 40k books. And every single little window into its world demands your attention. I could sit and look at them for hours.

It’s not just the cards, either. The decision to give each faction’s core deck mechanically identical cards, but with unique names, themes, and artworks that drown you in vibes is a stroke of joyful genius, and I’m still thinking about what might be on all the Kingdom Cards I haven’t seen yet. But they’re just the start; beauty is squirreled into every corner.

The board itself is a masterclass in form and function. The central grid gives each Region, and each Location within it, a distinct character, without letting any one slip out of step with the whole. The flow of the game’s seasons is neatly laid out in a looping track around the edge, with a pretty little marker to shift along as you move from phase to phase.

Even the wooden shelves painted to either side of the board, where Clash cards are laid, are laden with quiet flavor. They’re strewn with candles, rusty axes, and fantasy ephemera that a lesser designer could simply have not bothered to add. The thematic largesse just goes on and on.

In another board game, it’d be enough for the Heralds and Supporter meeples to be two sizes of painted wooden cylinder. In TOKC, they’re separately sculpted and painted avatars that perfectly match each faction: ships and towers, crescent moons and bonfires.

In another game, a different color scheme and symbol would be enough to set each faction’s player board and cards apart. Here, each has its own special, intricate decoration: for the Nobility, eagles swoop among keys and chains, while cats slink across the Uprising’s board, amid a garden of new plants, flowers, and daggers.

This elegant, tarot-like symbology is omnipresent, and offered up so lavishly that it oozes into your subconscious as you play, turning the game’s loose, vibes-only factions from formless ciphers into something that’s solid, but only in your head, and different for each person.

In a board game like this, where we experience adventure, discovery, and war in the abstract, not as dudes on a map, constructing the right kind of theme is a tight balance. It’s got to be coherent, engaging, and integral to the gameplay, but also feel natural, unforced, and open ended, leaving your imagination to fill the gaps. And, by all the gods, that’s exactly how TOKC feels. It just nails it.

Who is The Old King’s Crown for – and who is it not for?

So, what’s the catch? Normally, when searching for downsides in an otherwise exemplary game, I’d leap to the price, because quality often costs. No dice here, though. When TOKC goes to retail in its native UK, at the end of October 2025, it’ll cost £65 (around $87) – quite a reasonable price tag in its weight class.

For folks in the US, the main problem is getting hold of it at all. Only a few US web stores stocked it for pre-order; all have sold out, and the cheapest price I could find was a slightly steeper $95. But a high price for getting board games into America isn’t something to hold against the game itself – someone else is behind that one. Your next best chance may be the second printing Gamefound campaign, starting March 2026.

Not price, then – but surely there’s something wrong? Who won’t this crown fit? Well, it’s not for kids, I think. There’s just too much structure and complexity to muscle through in the first hour, and not enough pace and punch. Youngsters will love the art, but the game itself is too advanced. Its official age recommendation of 12+ is accurate.

Pertinently, this game is also very large. To accommodate its roughly two feet square board, and six inch deep player boards all around, plus token supplies, cards, and so on, you’ll need a decent sized table for the best experience. And I suppose, just for the sake of completeness, we can say that non fantasy enjoyers need not apply. TOKC’s world is one of swords, monsters, mountains, and magic, so if that’s a turn off for you, take note.

But beyond that, I’m coming up short. I look for mechanics I didn’t like, or halting moments in the game’s flow, or missteps in its theme, and I find none. Put my feet to the fire, and I’ll tell you the teach might be a bit of a slog for less experienced groups. That rigid structure means you have to say “phase” and “step” a lot, and anyone unused to such things might tune out a little, until everything falls together. But I honestly think even less experienced strategy gamers will get it and find something to love, given a little more time to get the eureka moment.

That’s just all there is. There’s nothing about this game that’s anything less than a definitive, all-time success in its category. It’s a solid 10/10 game to keep, treasure, and play again and again.

Verdict

I’m not going to say I’m speechless; that would be silly after writing 4,000 other words first. But, while there are at least 30 more beautiful little touches I could mention in TOKC’s design that make this cynical journalist’s heart sing, there’s just no need.

It’s simply the most surprising, joyous, visually spectacular, strategically sparkling, thematically fulsome board game I’ve played in recent memory. I believe it’s one of the best board games ever made. You should play it at the first opportunity.

If you’ve already played it and want to either a) come gush with me about how brilliant it is, or b) roll me in the comments about what a blinkered hyped out fool I’ve been to miss all those huge issues, feel free to come join our free Wargamer Discord community and let me know!