Bruno Cathala won the 2017 Spiel des Jahres for Kingdomino, a very simple, quick-playing game of tile-laying that’s cleverly balanced and playable for just about any age. On each turn, four domino-like tiles with two terrain squares and sometimes with one or more crowns on them will be laid out for the players to choose. The catch is that the tiles are placed in numerical order, where the more valuable tiles have higher ranks, and choosing a more powerful tile drops you in the selection order for the next round. Play continues until all the tiles are gone, by which point each player has at least had the chance to create a 5×5 grid around their starting square (twelve tiles per player). It’s super easy to learn and play, but there is plenty of potential for some strategic play if you’re all reasonably experienced gamers. It’s also one of the least expensive games on my top 100, usually selling for about $15.
The game’s runaway success led to a significant expansion called Age of Giants, that added new components and tiles as well as pieces for a fifth player to join; a roll-and-write two-player version called Kingdomino Duel that I thought was only tangentially connected to the original; and Queendomino, a standalone sequel game that you can play together with Kingdomino. Queendomino has also proven popular, but I think it does everything wrong: It adds complexity to the original game without making it more enjoyable, and probably doubles the game length.
The biggest difference in Queendomino, played by itself, is the introduction of red terrain squares that show construction sites, on which you can add single-square tiles with completed buildings that award you bonus points, mostly variable based on other things you’ve built on your grid. You buy those tiles based on a sliding scale, with the tile on the rightmost space in the market free and each one to its left costing a coin more. Some tiles let you place knights, which collect taxes based on the size of the area on which you just placed a knight, while others let you place towers, which can be worth points at game-end. The player with the most towers at any time gets the Queen token, which gives you a one-coin discount on any tiles you buy from the market.
The end-game scoring brings along the mechanics from the original game, where you multiply the number of squares in each contiguous area of any terrain (color) by the number of crowns on squares in that area, while adding bonuses from the construction tiles based on how may distinct areas you have, how many knights/towers you have, or just a fixed point value. The Queen token goes on the board of the player who has it as an additional crown, so it can easily be worth another 8-10 points.
I could understand the criticism of Kingdomino that it’s too simple; I personally prefer games that are more complex, whether I’m playing with family and friends or whether I’m playing online. But if you have a limited amount of time, or are playing with any kids 8 or younger, it’s perfect – you can rip through a game in 15-20 minutes and it is incredibly easy to teach. But Queendomino ruins Kingdomino’s simplicity with needless complexity: it makes individual turns take longer and makes your current score harder to calculate at a glance. Some games just don’t need to be busied up with additional rules, especially not those that make the down time between your turns take that much longer.