The best board games tell a story. In Galaxy Trucker, you’re transporting pipes across the galaxy by building ships out of them and hurtling through space. In Food Chain Magnate, you’re the CEO of a burgeoning fast food empire, as long as you can stay one step ahead of your opponents. In the Hall of the Mountain King, you play as trolls who were forced out of their home by the gnomes who took up residence in the halls the trolls built. But Earth is on your side, and collapsed in on those gnomes. Now, each troll clan is embarking on re-tunnelling through the mountain to unearth statues and place them in their rightful, honourable spots next to the heart of the mountain.
Designed by Jay Cormier and Graeme Jahns, with art by Josh Cappel and Kwanchai Moriya and published by Burnt Island Games in 2019, In the Hall of the Mountain King is a polyomino tile laying game with some strict resource management driving it. You start the game with a row of basic trolls, and on your turn you either need to recruit a new troll, bringing more resources into your control, or spend resources you control to dig some tunnels. The unique part of the game comes from the trollmoot, which is how you gain more resources. When you recruit a troll, you build a pyramid with your cards, and a newly acquired troll activates themselves (which produces the resources on that card), and every troll below them.
If a troll has resources already on their card, they don’t get to produce again, creating a really frustrating moment of wanting to be efficient and producing the resources you need at the moment, but also not wanting to waste potential resources by producing resource before all of your trolls are ready to receive them. It’s a fascinating resource management puzzle.
Most of the resources you’re collecting are used in building tunnels. Instead of hiring a troll on your turn, you trade in those minerals you collected to build a tunnel. The number of minerals you trade in determine the size of the tunnel, while the quality of minerals determine how many victory points you earn from that build. When you place a tunnel, you might need to spend hammers, if you’re attempting to hew through particularly hard rocks, and if you lay your tunnel on spaces on the board that have a resource or statue on it, you get those benefits.
The statues are one of the main way to score glory (or victory points). Another resource your trolls provide you are carts, which are spent to move those statues from tunnel to tunnel. The closer to the centre of the mountain those statues are, the more points they’re worth. And if you can get them onto a pedestal of the matching colour, their points are doubled. The other way to amass points is to turn your tunnels into great halls. By building large squares of tunnels, you can choose to dedicate it into a hall, and if you manage to arrange a statue into a place of honour, it’ll bring you even more points. Who knew Trolls were so into feng shui?
By now, you might notice that all the aspects of In the Hall of the Mountain King are tied together fairly well. You get trolls to get resources, spend those resources to place tunnels on the board, which earn you points. But the game tries to pull you in different directions at once. You need to build towards the centre of the board to have your statues be worth points, but all the statues and bonus resources are along the edge of the mountain. You want to save your minerals to build a big tunnel, but you have very limited number of opportunities to produce resources. Once your trollmoot is full, you may trigger the end of the game.
Actually, it’s the second player who completes their trollmoot that triggers the end of the game. In one of our games, we had a player complete their troll moot two or three rounds before anyone else. They spend all their resources on a big final turn, but then no one else recruited trolls, leaving him destitute for his last 4 turns of the game. If you’re going to hire your last troll, you really don’t want to be very far ahead of the other players, because your ability to acquire resources has just been kneecapped.
The game board has two mountains to choose from, depending on the number of players at the table. The smaller player counts have a smaller map, because the major point of interaction for In the Hall of the Mountain King is the fact that your tunnel network can never connect to another players. There are specific tiles called workshops that can abut tunnels from multiple players, but that’s the extent of it. This does mean on the higher end of the player counts for each map will feel like a much tighter and cutthroat game than the lower end of the player counts. Players have more room to hoover goodies up when there are fewer players to compete with.
I really like that the two halves of the main action propel each other forward. You’re either gathering resources, or spending resources to dig tunnels, and the gathering resources aspect is with brings the game to a close. I do worry about replayability, as the trolls themselves aren’t wildly different, and the game board doesn’t change at all, unless you count changing which entrance you’re starting at and the order of the statues.
What’s really going to informs strategies and create variability in the game are the spells. Before you do anything, you have the ability to spend one of the purple gems to cast a spell, which can have some really lucrative powers. However, after each spell has been used 3 times, it’s exhausted and replaced by another one. These spells are fun to trigger, and clever use of them is certainly going to set you apart from the rest of the pack. There’s probably a criticism to be made here about how some spells are just stronger than others, while others are wildly powerful in very narrow contexts, but I’m not bothered by it, as they’re publicly available to any player on their turn.
I like a clever resource distribution mechanism, and In the Hall of the Mountain King certainly has one, and it’s used to great effect here. Players are given interesting decisions to make and are forced to choose between short term benefits and long term goals. There are multiple strategies to chase here, ensuring repeat plays don’t feel identical. You can dig long, narrow tunnels to cross the mountain, or build big squares to dedicate them into great halls. All the mechanics feed into each other to create a unique and satisfying game that I’m keen to return to.
