The Golden Age of Dice Games continues with this new entry from Italy. And a very nice one it is, with gorgeous components and some clever mechanics. I’ve played it about five times now, with 3-5 players, and have enjoyed it every time.

The way in which you use the dice to select characters is appealing in its simplicity, but it’s implemented well enough (with the +2 chips and some building powers) and with enough variety in the abilities that you consistently have pleasant decisions on how to split your dice. I also think the designers did a good job with the different strategies inherent in the buildings. Requiring that the buildings in a row be constructed in order is a key rule and gives you enough varied strategies to try out to keep the game fresh. In fact, in my second game, I decided to go for a strategy based on the bottom row of buildings, with the plan being to build the last two buildings (which can generate VPs each season) as quickly as possible. (I've since found out that this is called the "Embassy Rush" strategy.) While this didn’t work out quite as easily as I’d hoped, I was basically able to implement this and managed a close victory. As one who usually favors tactical games, I found this quite satisfying.

With any dice game, there’s always a concern of what role luck plays and that goes doubly for this one, since there’s a planning and strategic element to the play. Obviously, there’s some luck involved; a player rolling a high number (the right high number) at a key moment can change the course of a close game. But the principal concern—-that success is more about rolling well than choosing well--is thankfully unfounded. I’ve found that when I roll low, I can often get just about as much accomplished as my opponents do by splitting the dice up and going for the low numbered characters. It’s by no means a guarantee and you need to take both the needs and the individual die faces of your opponents into account, but I’m able to pull this off more often than not. This is a sign of a good design. Of course, consistently rolling poorly will probably doom you (since there are some items that are only available with average to good rolls), but unless you walk around with your own personal dark cloud, you should find the luck of the seasonal dice rolls to be at an acceptable level. There’s also plenty of catch-up mechanisms worked into the design, so even a temporary string of bad luck shouldn’t be a killer. I was also concerned about the die roll used to resolve the battle each year. In theory, this could determine the game, since a player who consistently gambles with his army strength will benefit from good rolls and be crushed by bad ones. However, in practice, this doesn’t appear to be a major problem at all. There’s enough reason to win battles that ignoring your military doesn’t seem like a particularly viable strategy. And with a reasonable portion of the enemy cards, the losing effects aren’t that severe. I’m not saying that one or two of the battle die rolls couldn’t be very important in a game, but they don’t seem to dominate things nearly as much as I feared, so it winds up adding a little spice to the game without bothering us luck-averse types too much.

My only complaint with Kingsburg is that our games have gone on a little longer than I’d like. Because of the mechanics, there’s little downtime, but I’d be happier with the listed duration of 90 minutes than the slightly longer than two hour games I’ve played. I was hoping it would play more quickly with three than with five, but even with that number, it seemed to last just a bit too long (maybe because the decisions are a little more interesting with a crowded board, I’m willing to deal with a longer game with more players). Perhaps with more experience, we can shorten this up, but it takes a bit of time to decide how to split your dice and react to your opponents’ choices, so I’m not sure this will happen. Not a big deal, but enough to maybe keep this from my personal top 10 from last year’s strong list of designs. Still, overall I think this is a very appealing entry from new designers Andrea Chiarvesio and Luca Iennaco and I hope we’ll be seeing more from both of them in the future. I'm also very interested to see what they do with the expansion that they're working on.