King of Siam
Written by Cearbhail on April 27th, 2011One word best sums up King of Siam as a board game and as a design: Minimalist. It deals with the Thailand’s (or Siam’s) struggle to remain independent from Great Britain’s colonialism, all the while the three main political factions of the land fight for dominance. The players themselves are not the political factions, at least not directly: each player controls every color on the board and have to decide in which color they will focus their attention on during the game, while influencing all the others. It’s an area control board game, basically, in which the disputes are not between players but instead between the colors in which players can invest in or not.
What makes King of Siam such an impressive board game is its tightness. Each player has a hand of 8 cards (7 different types, one type with two equal cards) and all that the players can do in the game is either pass or play one of those cards, following the instructions. And you never get that card back. Yep, you only get 8 actions per game, so your choices are very, very hard. This board game only lasts eight rounds, with the scoring of a region happening at the end of each round: round ends when all players pass in a row, with a color winning over the territory if it has more cubes in that area than any other color. In the case of a tie, that space goes to Great Britain. With four ties (in a row or not, doesn’t matter), the game ends immediately.
When you play a card, you place the cubes on the board (or switch them around, or switch scoring order) following its specific conditions and you take a cube from the board, anywhere on the map. The cubes you take are placed in front of you, and show your allegiance to the three factions. At the end of the game, the faction with the most territories determines what the cubes are worth: if the Red faction has the most territories, the player with the most red cubes in front of him wins the game. If four regions are tied, then Great Britain has taken over the land, and then the player with the most set of cubes (one of each color, much like the scoring in Tigris & Euphrates) wins. So even if the color you’ve been supporting is in bad shape, you can still fight for a sudden death ending. This board game is tense from start to finish.
What is cruel (deliciously cruel) is that the “cube roster” is rather small: a lead of two cubes, for an example, is rather strong, since it’s the most of a single color you can add with a single card (remembering that each player can only do each action once!). So, at the same time you invest your future in a color, you make it weaker in the area disputes (by removing a bit of its presence from the board). In one specific match, it came to a point where two players had invested so much in the color that the general supply ran out, and the color no longer had the capacity to be placed back on the territories to fight for the majorities.
As you can probably tell, with the reduced number of actions and rounds, it’s a very quick board game. Matches take thirty to thirty five minutes, but it would feel weird to call this one a filler. It’s a tense, tight, and punishing game, with strong possibilities for sudden (and irreversible) turn-arounds. You have to make tough decisions every time it’s your turn: if you’re taking your actions lightly, you’re probably headed for a defeat. One player used up all his cards in the first half of the game and had nothing to do while the other two opponents defined the final configuration of the board, both of them making sure that the sitting duck finished in last place.
This board game is best played with three or four patient players, ages 12 and up. The four player game is particularly evil and nasty. It’s played in partnerships, with teams alternating play. The stroke of genius, or what makes this mode so amazing, is that players are not allowed to communicate between themselves during the game, so it becomes a game of trying to syncronize your thinking with your partner (scoring is team-based, so both of you lose if you go to different directions). I guess it goes without saying that this mode is for experienced gamers only, or at least players that are tolerant to other people’s momentary strategic blindness costing them their match.
Being so brainburny, it’s definitely not a game for everyone. At first it even seems incredibly chaotic and almost random. If it had any random factor other than the setup, I’m sure many would claim it’s a luck-fest. However, with a few plays of it (I have 6) you start understanding the dynamics of the game, which is much different from the usual area majority game. It rewards subtlety, patience and observation. The most useful skill you can learn is not just “what to do” but also “when to remain quiet”: I’ve read about the game people commenting that you have 8 decisions, but they forget that passing is also a decision, and the most difficult one to learn when you should do it.
Managing to make a game out of so little material (8 actions, 8 rounds, etc) and still striking amazing originality with simple and tried-and-true mechanisms (it is an area majority game after all) is a remarkable achievement. Even if I hadn’t enjoyed playing it (and I did, since it’s my kind of game), I’d probably admire it. One player that disliked the game even commented “it’s not fun, but it’s quite impressive”. And even if half and hour of silent brainburn is not for everyone, it’s still a game that I’m glad I own, even if it isn’t played as often as I like. The random setup and the clever design of the regions’ borders definitely give this some longevity, but I’ve only played this half a dozen times, so I can’t say for sure. Still, I give it an 8/10; the partnership game alone would be worth the admission price, but with three this board game is still pretty solid.
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