Who knew being evil could be so much fun? There aren’t a whole lot of boardgames where you are playing the bad guy (unless you’re in a one vs many game). A well-respected one that I’d love to play...
Who knew being evil could be so much fun?
There aren’t a whole lot of boardgames where you are playing the bad guy (unless you’re in a one vs many game). A well-respected one that I’d love to play sometime is Dungeon Lords from Czech Games Edition.
The Valeria series of games from Daily Magic have a lot of different mechanisms in them, but you are always on the side of the good and righteous.
Until Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria came out, anyway.
Designed by Stan Kordonskiy with art by the Mihajlo Dimitrievski (I seem to be on a Mico kick this week!), this game came out in 2021.
In it, players are one of the evil monsters of Valeria trying to tear down all of the great things that they’ve built in previous games (thematically…this isn’t a campaign or anything).
It has an interesting dice drafting mechanic that really shines, though a couple of minor issues bring it down a bit from excellent.
How does it work?
Let’s take a look.
If you already know how to play, you can click here to skip to the review.
As I said, players are one of five monster types who are trying to take over Valeria, bringing a millennium of darkness onto the land (until the next game where you are heroes, anyway).
I think they made the Green player so small to make James feel less tall
Each player gets a player board as well as a random Campaign Map.
The player board has a track for Magic, Gold, and Influence, and a bunch of player discs that they will be trying to move off the board to free up some cool stuff.
The main board is laid out and has five shrines where dice will be drawn from the bag and placed in them. There are five different colours of dice, and these represent troops for each monster type.
Each player has a Warden piece that they will be moving around from shrine to shrine, and back to their player board.
There are also Champions to hire, which can be done with Gold when you visit the Champion shrine.
When you hire a Champion, there are three different types with different costs.
Those with instant effects only cost 1 Gold (plus an extra Gold for each instant Champion you already have). Ongoing effects cost 3 Gold (with possible extra) and endgame scoring Champions cost 6 Gold (with possible extra).
The timer of the game and the main way you get points is by completing Battle Plans.
You can go to the Shrine and reserve a Battle Plan to your player board so you can complete it later. You can also go back to your player board to complete a Battle Plan from the shrine, though you have to pay the Gold cost to do so.
The Gold cost to reserve or fulfill is listed next to the Battle Plan.
So how do you do all of this?
On your turn, you will be sending your Warden to one of these shrines, taking a troop die and adding it to your player board.
The value of the die is the strength of the troop. The number in the circle is the discount you get for the Shrine you are at, if you need to spend Gold (or earn Gold, at the Gold shrine).
The tougher the troop, the less of a discount you get (the two numbers will always add up to 6).
This is the Battle Plan shrine. If you take the blue 5 die, then you can reserve a Battle Plan with a 1-Gold discount. If you take the grey 2, the troop is weaker but you can reserve a Battle Plan with a 4-Gold discount.
You’re always trading off that kind of thing.
At the Gem shrine, the number doesn’t matter. You just take a Gem (if you have room for it on your player board). The Magic/Award shrine also doesn’t require anything regarding the value of the die you take.
If you want to complete a Battle Plan (either from your player board or from the shrine), you move your Warden back to your player board and look at the troop requirements on it.
Each Battle Plan requires from 2-4 troops of the correct colour.
Until you open up one of the spaces covered by a disc, you can only have 3 troops on your player board.
You can always spend Magic to adjust a die’s strength, which can be valuable. If you have a Gem, you can either make a troop die a different colour or you can flip it (so 1 becomes a 6, 2 becomes a 5, etc).
The points you get for completing the Battle Plan depend on your troop strength as well as the Influence that you have on your player board.
You see which one is lower and then compare that lower number to the table on your player board (you can see the top of it above).
So if you have a Strength/Influence of 8-10, you would get 3 victory points.
When you complete a Battle Plan, you will remove one of the discs on your board and place it on the Campaign Map.
Whichever space you put it on will have possible bonus VP (though if you don’t qualify for it, you won’t get it).
Also, if you place it where it’s linked to another already-placed disc, you will get that linking bonus as well!
Removing a disc from your board will open up new possibilities.
For example, you are restricted to three Champions until you remove a disc there, in which case you will be able to have six Champions.
Once a player has completed 7 Battle Plans, the round finishes (so everybody has an equal number of turns) and then the game’s over.
Whoever has the most VP wins!
The only endgame points are the Champions that you may have hired, so for the most part what’s on the track is all you get.
There are more details that I glossed over, but that’s a pretty good overview of gameplay.
Is Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria an overwhelming force where you will be cheering all of the chaos you inflict? Or is it a weak force where the forces of Good will just wipe you out?
I don’t have a lot of experience with Valeria games, having only played Card Kingdoms of Valeria (once) and Villages of Valeria (a whole bunch).
However, I believe Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria is the first dice-drafting game in the series.
I really enjoy the action system in the game, where you are moving your Warden from one shrine to another, recruiting troop dice and then taking the action of the shrine.
It’s good that there is no blocking. Multiple Wardens can be at a shrine with no issues.
However, you can’t go to a shrine if there is no die there or if you can’t perform the action.
For example, if you can’t afford or don’t have room for a Champion, you can’t go to the Champion shrine.
What I really love about the game is the trade-off between discount and troop strength.
Do you need that high-strength die badly? Then that Champion you want to hire is going to be expensive!
But if you don’t need a high strength (maybe you don’t have enough Influence to make it necessary), you can get a huge discount on the Champion you want.
Heck, you can always flip it with a gem anyway, when you need it for battle.
Another concept I really like is the Campaign Map and how it works with the discs on your board.
It’s cool that you get bonuses both for placing your disc and for linking them in a path, making you pay attention to which type of Battle Plan you are wanting to do, and it’s always nice to get bonuses. Especially because your early Battle Plan completion will likely not get you many points.
The other thing to keep in mind, though, and part of that wonderful choices you have to make, is that you can only complete 7 Battle Plans. Then the game’s over!
But there are 9 spaces on your battle board and 10 discs on your board.
Do you want to free up those extra troop spaces? What about Champion spaces?
There’s one disc on the 14 space of your player board and none of your markers can go past that.
Notice that the 14 space now has a marker on it…because the disc is gone!
You really have to remove that one so you can get your Influence past that point, or you won’t be getting many points from Battle Plans at all.
But what other ones?
How about new places for reserving Battle Plans? Because at the start you only have one.
When you reserve a Battle Plan, you can put it on one of your open spaces and each one has a special ability when you put a Battle Plan there.
The first one that’s open at the beginning allows you to spend a Gold to gain an Influence.
The one I opened on the right above lets you hire a Champion at base cost (no extra because you have the some of the same type).
These can be really handy! And they also allow you to reserve multiple plans, thus more options.
The flow of the game works really well and once players are used to it, the game goes pretty quickly.
The box says 60-90 minutes, and that’s actually pretty accurate.
Even more important, it plays up to 5 players! So if you have the weird number of people in your group (thankfully we usually have 4 or 6 or 8, so we can split off into 2 games if necessary), Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria can accommodate you, and it scales really well.
The number of dice in the shrines and number of available gems is based on player count.
That shrine picture actually leads nicely into the three Award cards that will give you more points.
If you qualify for one of these Awards and go to the shrine, you can place one of your discs on it (which means you could possibly clear off 3 more spaces from your player board).
As with any dice game, there has to be dice mitigation, and Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria definitely has that. Between using Magic to adjust your troop strength or using gems to flip them (or change the colour, since part of the randomness in this game is pulling dice from a bag so the colour you want may not come out as readily as you like), there are plenty of opportunities to do that.
Especially because, as already mentioned, low-value dice give you a nice Gold bonus sometimes. So taking low dice can be a good thing!
There are a couple of issues I have with the game, one minor and two a bit less minor.
First, the game really needs a player aid or something that defines what all of the icons mean.
The rulebook lists all of the Champions, which is great!
But the Award cards aren’t shown at all.
Most are self-explanatory, but it still would be nice to have them explained.
Some of the icons show up in multiple places (like Campaign Map linkages) but the icon is only defined in a Champion description.
The game really needs an icon reference.
Because it can be difficult to look some things up in the rulebook! Which is the second issue.
The rulebook begins with setup, then objectives, the flow of the game, and how the game ends.
Then it goes into each shrine and how they work.
Then, it goes to completing a Battle Plan at your player board, then how the player board itself works.
Finally, it outlines the Campaign Map, and how the bonus spaces work, including the linkage bonuses.
One of those linking bonuses is taking a die from any shrine…but it doesn’t actually show you the icon for that!
That’s on one of the Champions, which are detailed at the back of the book.
Of course, an icon player aid would solve that problem too.
The rulebook does help you learn the game, but it’s horrible as a reference (except with the Champions).
The other issue I have with the game is that if you don’t keep pace with everybody else in completing Battle Plans, you’re screwed.
There is no other way to gain a bunch of VP, no other path to victory. All of the VP in the game are tied to the Battle Plans. The Campaign Map bonuses, the goals, the endgame Champions (for the most part).
If you fall behind?
There is no catch-up mechanism at all.
Does that matter to you? Does it matter to me?
Well, maybe check out the next Friday Night Shots post for my take on catch-up mechanisms.
However, in Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria, there isn’t even a way that you can make up a little ground on everybody else, unless they just suddenly have trouble getting the right coloured dice or something.
Sure, you could start trying to complete Battle Plans that only require two troops, but those won’t get you many points and if you’re already behind, they have a pretty good point lead on you.
It can be a bit dispiriting.
If you are teaching the game, you should emphasize that because you don’t want your new players to avoid playing a second time.
Let’s end on a positive note, though.
The artwork in the game is amazing! Though that’s no surprise given the artist.
You can definitely tell it’s the Mico’s style, and some people I know are getting a little tired of it, especially considering between Valeria and the Garphill games, he’s getting a lot of exposure.
To me, though, I don’t think I will ever get fatigued.
Given the caveats above, I do recommend Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria. It plays in a relatively quick time frame, can accommodate 5 players, and gives somebody a chance to roll a lot of dice (when they are filling and refilling shrines).
If you like dice-drafting games especially, you should give this one a shot.
(This review was written after 4 plays)