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Garphill games follow up to the North Sea trilogy has to be one of the most consistent series of games ever produced. Firmly spanning the medium to medium-heavy range, The West Kingdom trilogy boasts two games in the BGG top 100 with the latest no doubt soon to join them! With each game coming out a year after the last, the design team of Shem Phillips and S J McDonald has had a golden touch since 2018! The trilogy certainly boasts some of my favourite board games, both in terms of aesthetics AND stunning gameplay.
But, I hear you say, where do I start? Are they all for me? Do I need the whole saga? Well my Carolingian comrades, the noble Zatu blog team have braved the Kings court itself to bring you this guide to the West Kingdom games.
Architects Of The West Kingdom - Ben Herbert
How does this sound to you? A worker placement game where you are rarely blocked from doing what you want. Rather, you are rewarded by investing workers in locations by receiving more resources or more powerful actions.
How about a game where your moral choices impact your options within the game? Underhand deals may pay dividends in the short term but being virtuous when all is said and done is what will gain you favour with the king.
Or how about this? A game set in some sort of parallel history of 850AD. Rival architects will go as far as kidnapping their opponent’s workers and keeping them in their cellar before selling them to the state’s prison system in some sort of bourgeois version of Dog the Bounty Hunter. Heck Yes!
Architects of the West Kingdom is a unique, and immensely enjoyable, quick-playing, one to four-player take on worker placement. Players hire apprentices and collect the raw materials needed to construct landmarks throughout the land and work on the cathedral to impress the King.
The more workers you put on one spot the more of that benefit you will gain. But getting your workers back so you can use them elsewhere does not happen automatically. Wise decisions, good timing and a fair dose of push your luck are all needed to avoid ending up stuck with the majority of your workforce unavailable, or worse, in prison.
Hiring apprentices will make life easier for constructing buildings as well as granting you bonuses. The buildings themselves will also gain you immediate benefits and vital end game points.
Be the savviest architect and try not to go too far down the wrong side of the tracks to win the game. Architects of the West Kingdom is definitely my favourite worker placement game.
Paladins Of The West Kingdom - Kirsty Hewitt
One of the great things about Garphill games is the twist they put on well known and loved mechanics. Worker placement is one of my favourite game mechanics. Paladins takes the usual pool of workers per player and changes it up in an interesting way. You see, in Paladins, players do not have workers in “their colour”. Yes, there are different coloured workers. But these are accessible to all players. It is the colour of the worker which determines what they can do. Some spaces on a players board are shaded in a particular colour. Only workers of that colour can be placed there. Other spaces are clear which means that workers of any colour can go there.
At the start of each round, you draw workers from the pool in two ways. Firstly by playing a Paladin card. Each Paladin card has a special ability that enables you to bend the rules and grants you two workers. You then take it in turns to draft tavern cards. These cards depict four workers of various colours. Together these six workers make up your starting “hand” as it were. But, during the course of the game, there are lots of opportunities to unlock more workers. Really, Paladins is a massive efficiency puzzle.
You want to work out how to optimise doing as many actions as possible. Simultaneously, you must pick up the necessary resources and extra workers along the way. That is what makes the game sing for me. The feeling when your plans have all come together, you have been able to fortify twice getting to the heady realms of six points! It all feels very satisfying. The best bit is there are lots of ways to attempt to solve the puzzle of the game, so there is always more to try, and more to enjoy!
Viscounts Of The West Kingdom - Joe Packham
Viscounts is probably my favourite of the shockingly good trio of West Kingdom games. It stubbornly refuses to be defined by a single mechanism. Serving up instead a veritable smorgasbord of mechanical elements to its 1-4 players. The roughly circular and modular game board makes up the epic two-tiered rondel that serves as Viscounts action selection mechanism. The centre of this map/board/rondel is crowned by the three-tiered majestic castle. This melting pot of worker placement boasts a slew of cascading bonuses as well as regular interaction between players.
The main scoring actions of the game are to place workers on the castle, transcribe manuscripts, and build your personal buildings. These main aims are driven by the trading action and of course the deliciously twisted deck building with its conveyor belt of active cards. You’ll play your new card into the left of this player board escalator. It’ll push the other cards along, knocking one off the other end. The new card will determine how far you travel on the rondel. All three active cards will determine which actions are currently available to you. On top of that, some cards trigger their bonus when they become active, some have an ability all the time they’re active and some trigger only when they drop off the player board. It’s a deliciously thinky puzzle that never gets old.
The consistent themes of virtue and vice, poverty and prosperity in the 10th century Frankish empire traverse all three games. The art by the Mico also ties the trilogy together with Viscounts providing a suitably fantastic book end to a world-class trilogy!
The West Kingdom Tomesaga
Just like the Runesaga for the North Sea trilogy, the West Kingdom has its very own campaign expansion. The Tomesaga offers a three-chapter competitive experience that spans all three titles in the series. Players will once again be racing to reach achievements first in order to claim tomes that also award abilities in the other chapters. The winner of each game too will be awarded two tomes. After the final game, all the tomes will be totted up and the overall winner is the player who collected most across the campaign.
As well as this awesome campaign element, Tomesaga includes rules and components for three (one per game) co-op scenarios for the trilogy. Not part of the campaign rules these scenarios simply allow players to turn Architects, Paladins and Viscounts into fully Co-operative experiences. Players will band together in each game to overcome the depredations of the bad to the bone Overlord. All these options and variety could very well make this the best board game series ever made!