Digital board game adaptations fill me with joy, as I don’t have room for many physical board games. It has been a great entrance to discovering games I simply didn’t know existed. Kingdomino is one such example. It is a 2-4 player tile placement and point scoring game that has simple rules and can be completed in 15 minutes. The digital version comes with added extras, making it a great alternative to the original.
The goal in Kingdomino is to score as many points as possible by building a 5×5 or 7×7 square kingdom made of dominoes. You’ll have a castle as a starting block, and then players will take turns drawing from a pool of dominoes to place the dominoes in their kingdom. Initially, the first turn must be connected to your castle, but then branch off from there. Dominoes represent six different terrain types, such as crops, forest, mountains, and water. Each domino has two halves, and whilst some dominoes will have two water sides, or two forest sides, most of them will be a combination of two. When placing dominoes away from the castle, the only valid moves are dominoes that match terrain types, and so you’ll be connecting terrains using any of the four compass directions. The bigger the continuous plot of a terrain type, the more potential that plot has to score good points… but you’ll only score points if you can place crowns down, too.
Around half the dominoes contain one, two, or three crowns on one of their terrains. Crowns act like score multipliers. Place one crown inside a 5-tile-long water placement, and you’ll get 5 points. Get two crowns in the same plot, and you’ll score 10. The strategy in Kingdomino is to balance crowns and plots, chasing which terrains are likely to have more crowns remaining and understanding what tiles fit your current layout. Everyone can see the draw pile, so sometimes it’s handy to pick terrains other players aren’t chasing, but if that means you’ll only gain a crown or two, you’ll lose outright. This leads us to the cool strategic twist of turn order. Dominoes are drawn in batches of 4, flipped over together, and ordered from least to most crowns. At the start of the game, a turn order is randomly decided, and the first player gets to choose which domino they’d like to claim for their next move. The person with the least powerful domino in this turn gets to choose their next domino from the following batch first next time, and so on. This means players need to be strategic about when to dive for the big crowns because if you do it willy-nilly, you’ll always be last to choose, and you may miss the opportunity to snag the domino you really needed as another player took a weaker domino this turn to go earlier next time. I love this twist, and it is one of the main reasons I thoroughly enjoyed Kingdomino.
The digital adaptation runs smoothly and quickly. The mouse controls auto-click valid moves into place with ease, and the top of the screen shows a bingo card-style top-down view of what all the other players are building. All the information you need is at your fingertips without cluttering the screen, and the low-poly, pastel graphical style works a treat. There are two board design types to choose from (original and new), but inside those options, there are unlockable castle and building designs to pick from. The more you play and complete certain in-game achievements, like beating easy, medium, or hard AI, or scoring points from certain tile terrain types, you’ll earn points that can be converted to dominoes for winning overarching unlockables in the Lost Kingdom. This is where all the cosmetic unlocks are, but also bonus objectives. You can add two of these to any of your games when they are unlocked, and they provide bonus points for things like keeping your castle perfectly centred by the end of the game, or completely filling your kingdom without gaps. These bring a decent points haul and can be the difference between winning and losing. The AI seem quite aware of them, too, which makes battles a bit tougher.
Local multiplayer is a breeze to set up, and passing the mouse around is simple. Online can run in private lobbies with a five-digit room code, or by connecting to the public server instead. If no one is around, you can add AI to fill gaps, but crucially, it is simple to set up, easy to join, and stable. There are also community events that rank contributors to a leaderboard for more bonuses, which is a nice touch. If you are new to the game like me, the tutorial gets you up and running in five minutes max, so the learning curve isn’t steep for newbies, either.
Kingdomino is a great game with a clean user interface, easy to understand rules, and a vibrant digital conversion with all the options I wanted and needed. This is perfect for a quick 15-minute throwdown, and fans of quick strategy or tile placement games should grab this now.
Review copy provided by the developer. Kingdomino is out on PC now.
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