Kingmaker The Second Review Part 1

It is the War of the Roses in England, and everything is in turmoil. You will work to be crowned King of England, but be wary, as others are after the same pursuits! This 2023 version of Kingmaker improves on the original (and subsequent reprints) in many ways, so let’s run down a few of those changes.

This is Part 1 of my Kingmaker The Second review, looking at some of the changes to the board and the game. We will continue releasing various reviews until we are finished, and will then compile everything in one article! Thanks so much for reading!

Changes from the Original

The first obvious change is the board – everything on the new Kingmaker board is much clearer and easier to see. Regions are more defined, and roads are bolded and easily visible, making playing the game much more enjoyable. The game itself has also been streamlined a bit making it a shorter, more direct experience. To that end, based on my view, it does appear that smaller regions have been grouped together in this game to make a bit larger areas.

The game board has also been turned into grids – marked by little red marks along the bottom and side of the board – which greatly helps with finding specific places on the map. If you aren’t as familiar with Kingmaker as I might be, finding certain locations on the board WOULD have taken a long time – this alleviates that a bit.

There are other subtle changes to the board as well. A few locations have actually moved on the board – nothing drastic, but sometimes a space or two over from where they were. This is for balancing purposes, and it actually does make a difference in how the game plays. There are also new locations around the board as well.

There are a ton of cards in Kingmaker, and they are all neatly labeled in the upper corner for whether they are for Kingmaker Classic, Kingmaker The Second, Kingmaker Classic Extended Version, etc. These cards should be sorted before your first play, and as I was looking to play The Second version of Kingmaker, I took out anything with DIV, KC, EXT from the decks. There are also various tokens you will and will not use when playing specific versions of the game.

Kingmaker The Second has a new victory condition for winning the game as well – no a Royal Victory isn’t the only way to win, you can also win by having enough prestige (based on your player count). It’s worth noting here that although the box says 1-6 players, Kingmaker The Second can only be played with 2-5 players!

There are other changes we will detail as we continue to write about Kingmaker The Second, but for now we will end Part 1 here and move onto Part 2 soon, the components!