King's Crown

Like Nine Knights, King's Crown is designed by Go Grandmaster Lee Sedol and is part of the WIZSTONE series from Korea Boardgames. Along with the other games in the series, it's an abstract strategy game that's produced to a high standard - in this case with 24 numbered plastic crowns (12 apiece) and 48 plastic number inserts (1-24 in two colours).

King's Crown is a five-in-a-row game for two players where you win by being the first to complete a 'bingo' horizontal, vertical or diagonal line of five crowns (or four if you use the centre square). The crowns will show a number printed in either gold or white. When you make your line of crowns they don't all have to include crowns of the same colour but the colour is important in relation to where crowns can be placed in relation to others already on the 5 x 5 board. When you place a crown out on the board orthogonally adjacent to one of the same colour, it must be either 1 higher or 1 lower. Crowns with a different colour number can be placed adjacent if they are the same number. If you're placing a crown between two or more crowns already on the board, you only have to satisfy one not both placement criteria. It's very possible that neither player will make a winning bingo line but you can also win the game if it's just your opponent who has no legal placement available to them.

What differentiates King's Crown from similar five-in-a-row games is not so much the placement rules as the fact that you start the game by drafting the number inserts for your crowns from a bag or from those on the table. Players first take two number inserts each from the bag and place them behind their screens. They then take turns drawing two number insert tokens from a bag or flipping face up a token that's face down on the table. You select a token and add it to those behind your screen, slotting it into one of your 12 crown playing pieces. After you select a token, any face-up tokens on the table are flipped to their face-down side. This means that increasingly the drafting phase becomes a memory challenge as, over successive turns, players each build the 12 crown they'll be using to play the game. Knowing the placement rules, you'll try to select tokens that can be placed next to each other or next to those you've seen your opponent draft.

The combination of drafting with an abstract strategy game is unusual, and it's a process that you may well find takes longer than the 'main' game play of placing your crowns out on the board. If both players are attentive and have a good memory, it's the meat and drink of this game: you'll have seen 10 of the 12 crowns that make up your opponent's set and that will obviously inform your strategy when it comes to placing crowns on the board. Just be warned that for less attentive players who end up drafting a fairly random selection of crowns, the drafting phase will feel like an unnecessary faff.

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