It’s kind of fascinating going back and playing older games. I get that in the grand scheme of the universe a mere 20 years is a blink of the eye, but in the board game hobby, a lot has changed in 20 years. Aesthetic preferences have evolved, who mechanics have fallen out of favour, and productions have been massively upgraded in the past two decades. But the wonderful thing about games is that when you buy a game it has the opportunity to become timeless. There’s no reason a game released in 2007 would be any better or worse than the new games that are coming out today? Right?

In Kingsburg, players are Lords sent from the King to administer frontier territories. Each round, players will roll their dice and use assign those dice to various advisors, representing their influence. The board ranges from 1 to 18. The lower end advisors have measly powers, like getting a single resource each, while the higher numbered advisors generally have much more powerful abilities.

Each round features 3 dice placement phases. After each dice placement phase, you have the opportunity to spend some of the resources you’ve amassed and build a building to grant yourself a persistent benefit for the rest of the game. Come winter, you’ll need to defend against the horde, which is simply a matter of flipping up a card, and then comparing each players strength, and then gaining the benefits if your strength is higher, or suffering the penalties if your strength is lower.

The dice placement round is where you’ll spend most of your time with Kingsburg. Starting from the first player, you have the opportunity to place one or more of your dice on the advisor that matches their strength, summing up the pips on the die if you choose to use more than one at a time. Once you place one or more of your dice, the next player takes a turn, and you go around and around until all players have placed all of their dice. The sticking point in Kingsburg is that each advisor can only have one set up dice on them, so if you roll three 4’s, and the first player places one of their dice on the level 4 advisor, and the second player places their two 6’s on the level 12 advisor, you’re pretty much locked into taking that level 8 advisor.

Now, any dice placement game lives and dies on it’s modifiers, and Kingsburg has some available to the player. Each round you’re allowed to use a single +2 chip to increase the value of one group of dice. You do have to earn those +2 chips, but having one available to you each round can prove invaluable, as the opportunity for hate drafting is incredibly high in Kingsburg. In addition to the +2 chips, some of the higher level buildings will introduce perks such as placing your dice on one advisor higher or lower than your sum of dice would typically allow.

The buildings are the real exciting part of Kingsburg. At the start of the game each player gets a large sheet detailing all the buildings and upgrades available to them throughout the game, and most of your actions throughout the game will be simply amassing resources so you can afford another building at the end of the round. You need to build your buildings from left to right, meaning if you really covet the abilities those far right side buildings offer, you’ll need to plan a few rounds in advance to get them built.

Every winter you’ll need to defend your keep. Each year will have a face down enemy card, just waiting for it’s time to shine. Throughout the year, a couple advisors will allow you to look at the card, so you know what you’ll be dealing with. Each card also shows the range of strength values that it can have, giving the players who don’t get to look at the card a rough idea of what they need to prepare for. Each winter, that card flips up, and players compare their strength to the value on that card. You can earn strength throughout the round, and some of your buildings will give (or take away) strength (some buildings only provide bonuses against specific types of enemies). if you exceed the threshold, you’ll earn a benefit. If you merely meet the threshold, nothing happens. But if you come in under the strength threshold, you’re in for a punishment.

In a game that’s all about amassing resources to build buildings, the punishment of losing a few resources might not seem like that big of a deal. But the reality of Kingsburg is that when you lose resources, you’re wasting time, and your opponents will slowly start pulling ahead. By not building a building in a round, you’re forfeiting the points that building would afford you, and whatever the special ability of that building is. The sooner you build sooner buildings, the more time you can make their special effect work for you, and squeeze more juice from the tight economy.

I don’t know if this is a Kingsburg specific thing, or a byproduct of playing 20 year old games, but Kingsburg makes a great first impression. It’s exciting and interesting, interactive in just the right ways, and when you’re done, you’ll walk away thinking about what you could have or should have done to clinch the victory. But as I play it more and more, the charm of Kingsburg fades a bit. Even with the expansion that adds a few more rows of buildings to vary every play, I can’t get away from the fact that the whole game is just about amassing 3 different resources to maybe build a building each round. I don’t often find many reasons to diversify my strategies these days, the best buildings at this point are fairly obvious, making every other building on that sheet an unnecessary distraction. Maybe if there were a way to build the 3rd and 4th column buildings without their prerequisites, but the fact that you only get one build action per round will really limit your horizons.

One more small gripe. In the past 20 years, Kingsburg has had a second and third edition come out, and I have to say from purely an artistic point of view, I vastly prefer the original. The court members are all full of colour and character in the first edition, while the second and third edition just look like generic character portraits ripped from a B-tier fantasy video game. The unchanged gameplay is still solid, so I’d recommend playing it if its the only copy available to you. But you’ll have to pry the original edition from my cold, dead hands before I pick up these new versions.

I do enjoy playing Kingsburg. The dice-placement mechanism works wonderfully, injecting risk and uncertainty into an otherwise straightforward system. Misjudge the order of your placements and your opponents can punish you immediately. Neglect your military strength and a brutal winter can undo an entire year’s worth of planning. Those moments of tension create stories that linger long after the game ends. Twenty years later, however, some of Kingsburg’s limitations are easier to spot. The core loop is ultimately about gathering three resources and converting them into buildings. With experience, certain building paths begin to reveal themselves as stronger than others, and the decision space can feel narrower than it first appears. Even the expansion’s additional building options don’t entirely solve that problem.

Yet judging Kingsburg solely by modern standards feels a little unfair. One of the joys of revisiting older games is seeing where many of today’s ideas came from. While newer designs have refined and expanded on dice worker placement, Kingsburg still delivers an engaging, interactive experience that remains easy to teach and satisfying to play to this day. I’m reminded that board games used to be mean, and every once in a while, I revel in that feeling. Not every game becomes timeless, but Kingsburg earns its place as a reminder that good design can remain compelling long after newer and shinier games have taken the spotlight.