Kingdomino Game Review
Reviewed by Sandip Stapleton
Just before Christmas, we were lucky enough to receive the game Kingdomino in exchange for an honest review. Kingdomino is a family game for 2-4 players, age 8+. We are a family of four and my kids are 5 and 8 years old. Both of them love playing board and card games, as does my husband, so we were happy to have a go at this game which we hadn’t heard of yet.
The main aim of this game is to build yourself a kingdom which includes, grassy areas, lakes, mountains and marshland. You also want your kingdom to have more properties and be worth more than the other player’s kingdoms. The way to build your kingdom is to place matching tiles against each, in the way you do with dominos, hence the name Kingdomino, but you cannot build your kingdom bigger than a 5X5 grid.
The pieces are nicely coloured card pieces but they are fairly solid and are not easily bendable so they are nice and durable.
Unfortunately, the game we received did not come in the original game box but all the pieces were there and intact. Depending on number of players you have, the instructions tell you how many pieces you should be playing with. On the first read, the game sounds a little complicated, but actually once you play for the first time, we all completely understood what we needed to do, even my 5-year-old!
The game is really interesting because you need to adjust how you want to build your kingdom with each turn that is played, based on what pieces are available to you, guessing what your opponents need, working out what will give you the highest points, and making sure you stick to the 5×5 grid size.
Despite not getting a box with our game, we did get a drawstring bag to keep everything in. The game is so lightweight that it was a perfect game for us to cart around to all our friends and family’s homes that we visited over Christmas and New Year. Everyone that we played with loved playing the game and I’ve lost count how many hours we have clocked up laying this game. We haven’t ever got bored of it. We even ended up playing with it once the kids had gone to bed! The sign of a good game. An added bonus for our family, is that it is helping my 8-year-old daughter with her simple addition and multiplication as she is constantly trying to work out which piece will score her the most and which piece is the most sought after by the other players.
A lot of the people that we played the game with also have primary aged children and they have said that they would look into buying the game for their family.
A quick Google search for the game told me that Kingdomino won the German game of the year, Spiel des Jahres award in 2017, and I can completely see why. Kingdomino is a robust, lightweight, strategic, fun and enjoyable game for all ages and is a perfect family game that can be easily carried around as a travel game to take on holiday or to a friend’s/family house.
Rating: 5/5
RRP: £17.99
Available to buy from Amazon here.
