Kingdom Legacy: Rip & Tear, Feudal Style

I’m not too familiar with “legacy” board games: I’ve only played half the campaign of a Pandemic Legacy game, and yes we did some wild stickering on the map of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, that wasn’t as radical as permanently ripping up cards as Kingdom Legacy instructs you to do. Which turned out to be a lot of fun, actually! Sure, you can also store them somewhere else for another playthrough, but since the game is very cheap (€14), why not treating yourself with some ripping & tearing.

The core gameplay loop of Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdom is very simple: draw cards and try to upgrade exactly one which triggers a complete discard. Repeat the whole process until you’ve run out of cards: the round is over, time to “discover” two new ones. You see, in the beginning, your kingdom is worth squat: you’ll primarily draw meaningless grasslands, small markets, and near-empty woods. As you progress, upgrading means building a farm on that grassland and planting more valuable trees in those woods. At the end of your turn, two new cards are always added to your deck, gradually nudging you to a more sophisticated society (oh hi knight) and advanced tech (cool an architect).

Both the upgrade and the card draw system is pretty clever. You’d think churning through your deck to more rapidly discover the better cards is a good strategy, but you’d be wrong: the sooner you’ve cycled through everything, the sooner the game ends and the less existing cards in your deck you’ve been able to upgrade—meaning less points.

As for the upgrade system, a look at the above photo will tell you that almost each card has 2 to 4 sides. Upgrading is a matter of turning it upside-down or flipping it to the right direction, depending on the resources you put in (meaning discarding existing ones, such as the tree hut for a coin and two wood resources as seen on the top left). This means you can morph your grasslands into two different things and potentially end up building a totally different kingdom compared to mine. This is true for discovering cards as well: sometimes you’re instructed to draw four new ones, look at them, pick two and rip the other two. The ones you ripped might have lead to other discoveries which now became inaccessible. When I completed the campaign, there were almost 25% cards left in the box that I did not discover because of the choices I made! So yes, Kingdom has a high replayability factor—if you don’t rip & tear or re-buy a pack, that is.

Most choices are not tough: you have no idea what is coming and it’s best to go in blind, so you can’t make strategic decisions, only tactical ones based on the cards in play or in your deck right now. This is a good and bad thing. I liked the cognitive load the game had on offer: it was good enough to make me think but not too straining. It doesn’t even take a lot of space and I loved that as well: here’s a card game with a sense of progression that you can play on the coach. You won’t be needing any friends either as Kingdom Legacy is a solo-only game.

Let’s discuss the three things that I wasn’t a big fan of. First, the elephant in the room: yes, Jonathan Fryxelius used Adobe AI tech to generate all graphics on the cards. The result is a mixed bag at best. Some knights look rough and sketchy while others near-photorealistic with weird generic faces. The buildings and scenery were all right but the inhabitants of your kingdom feel off. I understand why you would want to opt for this approach as a small designer/publisher but I still object and would rather have paid €30 if it involved lovely consistent artwork of a person.

Second, the rules. They are simply awful. The flimsy piece of paper the game comes with is enough to get you started but a lot of specific cards and keywords evoked confusion that was not explained at all. Thankfully, https://www.kingdomlegacygame.com/expansions/FeudalKingdom exists, but it feels like an afterthought. For instance, the way permanent cards work was confusing to me: if you use their resources you still have to discard them according to the website. Of course I didn’t and was already halfway through the campaign.

Lastly, you “win” by counting the total score of each card: the more you’ve upgraded one, the higher those points will be. But a simple tally after all that kingdom building effort felt rather meaningless, and since apparently I unconsciously cheated a lot, that number became even more ridiculous. Towards the end of the game, most of my turns were useless since I already upgraded most cards or couldn’t seem to draw that one resource I sorely needed, so I spent a lot of time passing or drawing even more junk.

Still, flipping cards, attracting noblemen, and building up the kingdom was a lot of fun and is a great way to spend the evening for a few weeks. I didn’t really care about the points anyway, and I’m looking forward to buying the Distant Lands expansion to begin another solo adventure. For less than €20 you’d be hard-pressed to find another game that keeps you busy for a while.

• Total plays? 10+. I think the campaign is about 15 hours?
• Solo friendly? Exclusively.
• Two-player friendly? No. I played a session together to learn the ropes but it’s more fun to decide for yourself.
• Quality? Mediocre. The cards are okay, but the manual is terrible and the art is wonky.

Keep or Cull? Keep. You need a finished version of this one to start the next campaign; otherwise there’s little need to hang on to this box.