Another day, another review. Thank you for dropping by. You are probably the only one that did. So what are we talking about today? ULTRA TINY EPIC KINGDOM that's what. Lets begin.
Game Title: Ultra Tiny Epic Kingdom
Designer: Scott Almes
Publisher: Gamelyn Games (2016)
Player Count: 1-5 players
Time: 30-45 minutes
BGG Rating: 835
I will admit I am a fan of Tiny Epic series. The amount of game you can get in such a small box is appealing to me. I am a fan of Tiny Epic Kingdom and Tiny Epic Kingdom Heroes Call. Just got my copy of Tiny Epic Western. Super excited to try that out. Interestingly, not a fan of Tiny Epic Galaxies. So,when Gamely Games launched Ultra Tiny Epic Kingdom, I just had to get a copy. So, how does it play?
You set up the play area like above. The action card (with 5 grey tokens) and tower card in the middle. Each player to be given faction card, resource card, resource token and cubes in the chosen colour. Then there's a bunch of jargon on cube placement. During your turn you take a grey token and place it on an empty space on one of the action on the action card. If you cant, clear the action card and pick any. Then you choose either you want to do the action or not. Next the other players choose whether they want to do that action or collect resources. The actions you can choose from are:
- Patrol-Regional army movement/engage in war.
- Quest-Territory army movement/engage in war.
- Build-Pay Ore to construct tower
- Research-Pay mana to learn magic.
- Expand-Pay food to grow army
- Trade-exchange any resources for other resources.
The game ends when either one player has all 7 armies in play, a player has a 6th level on the tower card or a player has researched all 5 levels of magic on their faction card and the scoring begins. There are a bunch of other rules on engage war and scoring. I think if you want to better understand them, here a video from "Watch it played" which is very helpful:
Now lets get in to what I think. Firstly, I love how small it is. It looks like a deck of cards first to any random passer by but once you open you are welcomed to beautiful cards of various factions and cubes. The Kickstarter deluxe version comes with a sack and a dice which i'm not sure whether it will be available for retail version. I love how quickly I can actually teach the game. It is easy to teach on all the action, when the game end and how to score points.The engage in war is an interesting which makes any player think twice on how much they want that spot. I should probably talk a bit on this, right???
Moving on to cons. What I do not like about it? The size. I know. I know. This is contradicting. But what I don't like about the size is two things. The first I wont be able to sleeve the cards. I love trying to look after my board game collection (I emphasise on trying) but not being able to sleeve cards irritates me. The other is they use cubes which is genius and ensure everything can be put in the box. This provides one problem during set up by mixing everything together. You will have to remove all the cubes even if your only just gonna play a three player game. Preferable, I would like to have a quicker setup. The last issue with the game is that its not for all. My group don't enjoy conflict game to much thus they weren't pulled into it. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the game.
Conclusion
So, my verdict is I love this game. It will be a replacement to Love Letter or Hanabi as my portable game if I go backpacking (I mean a huge IF). It isnt for all, but if you want a light conflict game that you can carry anywhere in your back pocket (which I wont recommend) this is a game for you.
7/10
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