I suppose re-theming an existing game can be a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, re-theming an existing game means that you have a built-in audience. Plenty of people have already played the game, Lots of reviews for the game already exist on BGG, it’s a known quantity. I would assume that means it’s easier to sell, just by the virtue of people having already played it, but you’ve given the game a new coat of paint and made it widely available. The downside is however, that no matter what you do, if you make any changes at all, suddenly the new edition will forever be compared to its predecessor. The discourse around your game will be consumed with debates over old vs new themes. I saw it happen with Stonemaier Games reimplementation of Libertalia, and I saw it happen again with For the King (and Me), designed by Steve Finn and published by IELLO in 2021.

For the King (and Me) is a re-theme of Steve Finn’s previous game Biblios. In Biblios, players are monks trying to gain majorities in different categories of books. It’s a small but attractive little game, albeit a little dark with its monastery aesthetic. For the King (and Me) has a much brighter colour palette, and the cover features a young, naive king surrounded by a bunch of cartoonishly scheming advisors. The theme of this game is that you’re trying to manipulate your position with the king to earn yourself a bevy of titles, which will earn player prestige, and the person with most prestige from their titles at the end of the game is the winner.

The game takes place over a series of turns. On your turn, you will take cards equal to the number of players plus one and look at them one at a time. When you look at a card, you choose to either put it in a face down auction pile, place it face up in a row for your fellow advisors to pick from, or put it face down for yourself to keep. Once you look at a card and put it into its spot, you can’t move it anymore, meaning if you choose to put the first card you draw into your pile to keep, none of the other cards that you’ll draw for the rest of this turn will be eligible to be put into your own pile. Once you’ve drawn all the cards and allocated them appropriately, the player to your left will pick the first one from the public market you just created, and then it goes around the table until all those cards are picked. Then the next player takes their turn, preforming the same ritual. And around and around the game goes until the deck runs out of cards, and players then proceed to the auction portion of the game.

Before I continue though, it’s important to know what the cards do. The cards that you’re picking from will either be colours, red, blue, purple, pink, orange, or green, and each of those coloured cards will have a number. At the very end of the game, you will compare your sum of each colour to each other player, and whoever has the most points wins the associated title. There’s a second-place award to win as well. Another card type in the deck will let players modify the prestige value of the titles, either pushing them up or down in value, and sometimes allowing a player to modify one or two titles at a time. I suppose it’s important to mention that when you do this, you’re really modifying the higher-value title, as the second-place title’s value is always half the value of the main title, rounded down.

Lastly, there are gold cards you can acquire, which are used in the auction phase of this card drafting game. Once the deck runs out, the next player in turn order takes the top card of the face down pile and reveals it to the table. Starting with the player to their left, Each player calls out a sum of gold that they’re willing to spend to acquire that card. If the card revealed is a gold card, then players can bid a number of cards they want to discard to acquire that gold. Once that pile of cards is exhausted, everyone reveals the sums of each of the colours and claims their titles. The player with the most prestige points from their collected titles is the winner.

As a production, I like the art and colour a lot more than the more serious-themed Biblios. I like seeing caricatures of goofy advisors with high eyebrows, regal moustaches, and pompous grey wigs. I really enjoy the cartoony aspect of it. It leans into the goofiness of the whole scenario. I found the cardboard title tiles on the centre board to be more annoying than anything else. Every time someone modifies the value of one of those tiles, you are supposed to take the title tile off the board and put a new one with its new value in its place. And because the lower title value is always half rounded down of the higher value total, sometimes you’d be adjusting two tile titles at the same time. It’s just a lot of shuffling little cardboard bits around. And I probably wouldn’t even complain about this if the predecessor Biblios didn’t have a more elegant solution in dice. When modifying values, its just easier to rotate a die to represent a new value than it is to swap out two cardboard tokens. We were saying at the table that it would make a lot of sense to have a large die and a smaller die and just use that instead of all those titles. Now, that said, the titles do have a little bit of flair on them, saying what title you receive. As a small example, you could be the Royal Pillow Fluffer or the Poultry Plucker, and that’s kind of cute, and I appreciate that. But I still think dice would have been the way to go for this kind of game.

The gameplay is as simple as it gets, you’re literally just flipping cards and picking where to put them, but you do get some tense decisions. The moments when you reveal a mid-range colour card of a set you’ve been collecting, you have to ask yourself: “Is that worth keeping?” And then you choose to keep it, and the next reveal is the highest-value card of the colour you just took. ARGH! You just kind of shot yourself in the foot a little bit. The alternative is you put that one into the auction pile, and the rest of the cards you draw for the round are useless to you. Such consternation!

There’s a good mix of known and unknown information, and depending on how good you are at tracking what players take when drawing from the face up cards, you can get a good sense on what other players have. Sure, maybe you can let that one blue go away because you’re sure that player didn’t have any blue before this, and you a couple blue cards in your hand, so you feel pretty safe. But because players are taking cards face down, you never actually know what everyone has. The auction is equally tense. When a card comes up that you really want, you try to bid low and hope to get it for a discount, but then the players next to you bid as well, jumping the value to unreasonable heights. It can sting.

Just like in Biblios, I love in theory the mechanic of increasing and decreasing the value of the titles. It’s a really cool and interesting to have the value of what you’re working towards to be constantly in flux. In practice, I find that most of the values actually come out in the wash. Someone tries to pump up red, the next player just pushes it right back down. And because there’s an equal number of positives and negatives, most things end up being staying roughly the same. I don’t feel there’s very much room for clever plays. Especially when the luck of the draw is so prevalent. Maybe scoring one of those cards near the end of the auction can swing the game a bit, but I don’t think it ends up being particularly impactful in the end. Maybe at a lower player count, where each player has more control, more opportunities to pump a value, or if multiple players team up to really take down the value of a specific colour, but in my experience this rarely comes to fruition.

One big change from Biblios is the existence of second place. In Biblios, only the player who has the majority in each colour wins anything. Here, second place gets a half-value prize, rounded down, meaning two players might actually team up to increase the value of a colour, and it’s more likely that players will spread themselves more thin trying to get more second-place values. Hopefully this will encourage players to use the +/-1 cards for good and not evil. After all, more points is always more fun than less points.

At the end of the day, For the King (and Me) is a fun and light game. Biblios is the perfect game to begin or end game night because it plays in half an hour and encourages interaction between players. It’s fun to steal the majority from someone, or when you see someone really going hard on one colour, you tank the value of that title. You may not have as much control as I might prefer in a game, but it’s over in half an hour, and it’s a generally good time. If you have been sad that Biblios is unavailable, For the King (and Me) is a pretty great replacement.