That sounds awesome, but I'd love to hear an AP report (namely "How many hours/people does it take to play, realistically") before I'd spend on it.

-Andy

So we played it last night at SG Boston, with the full 8 players that you're supposed to have. Note that I played the King, who is a sorta GM/referee character, so I definitely don't have a full sense of what it was like to hatch conspiracies in the back room.

You can now download the rulebook on the game's webpage, so consider doing that as well.

The game REALLY needs a two-page rules summery that you can just read aloud to the group (maybe I'll make one). As it was, I basically skimmed the rules and yelled out important stuff. After about 30 minutes of prep, we pretty much understood enough to play, though we never really got a grip on how petitions work, which is a critical part of play. Whoops.

So there are 7 named characters plus the King. They are:

- The Royal Bastard (starting heir)
- The Queen
- The Archbishop
- The Steward
- The Ambassador
- The Baron
- The Treasurer

Each character has their own cardboard fold-out picture that contains special rules and abilities that apply to that character. The card also lists 4 "stats"...

Each character has a fixed starting amount of gold (a resource). Each character also has a starting allowance which is the amount gold they get at the beginning of every turn. Gold is spent in order to use some abilities or play certain cards, but, in general, didn't seem to be all that important unless you were playing certain characters.

Each character has a number of points of Status, which seems to be the main currency of the game. If you go below 2 Status, you're not allowed to attend Council meetings (we occasionally forgot this), which is where the real action is. Status, in effect, is like the political HP of your character. There were also suggestions about how you're supposed to roleplay Status (groveling to high Status character, sneering at low Status peons), but we tended to ignore those with relative impunity.

For each point of Status you have, you get a Status Card, which gives you some sort of permanent special ability in addition to the abilities you get from your character. Most of these abilities can only be invoked once a turn, at certain times.

The last stat is called Favor and is the most bizarre of the lot. Favor is supposed to be a measure of how much the King likes you. The King is supposed to hand out Favor like fanmail and dock points when people don't roleplay Status properly (the only incentive to do so, really). That works alright, I suppose. But, then, some cards or abilities adjust Favor too, which takes that economy out of the King's hands and makes it much more fickle instead of just arbitrary. Also, the number of Favor you have is effectively the number of votes you get in Council meetings when discussing petitions. And it was a ROYAL PAIN to add up all the Favor that was thrown around on different sides when it came to voting. Way too much paperwork. But we'll get to that later.

There was also an economy based on Intrigue Cards, which are distributed to players at the beginning of each turn along with their allowance. These cards are spent and, thereafter, disposed of, in order to do certain things. They're like one-shot versions of Status Cards. It's impossible to describe the variety of Intrigue Cards here. They can do a lot or a little, depending on the card. Some are just really annoying.

Finally, let me talk about the structure of the game.

First, you have the Assembly Phase, where all the resources are handed out for this turn. At this point, the King also draws a card that represents his Health for this turn. His Health determines how the King will act in the Council Phase, which we'll get to in a minute.

Second, there's the Diplomacy Phase, which is exactly like the negotiation phase in Diplomacy (the board game). Players meet with each other individually or in small groups to scheme and plot. Many Intrigue cards and abilities are used in this phase, so resources are often swapped around or stolen. Stats can be raised and lowered.

Finally, there's the Council Phase, which is the part we didn't really understand that well. Anyone with less than 2 Status cannot participate in the Council. Starting with the lowest Status character and working upwards, players can make petitions to the King according to the terms described on any resources they have, including Intrigue Cards, Status Cards, and their character's natural abilities (we often had players just make up the terms of the petitions, which is not how things are supposed to work). Often, players would decide not to make petitions. Generally, petitions are addition ways to move resources around, raise or lower stats, get your enemies dismissed from Council, or similar things. There are a few game effects that can only be achieved by a successful petition.

After the petition is made, it is discussed (a step we often skipped for time), and voted on, the King draws a random card from a special set of ten. This card, combined with the voting results and special guidelines based on the King's current health, determines the result. Generally the cards say "The King will agree if there are a net total of N votes in favor." I assumed this means you subtract the AGAINST votes from the FOR votes, which is what took so long. It was much more fun when the King arbitrarily decided for or against things (based on the card he drew or his health) or when the King was too sick to run Council and the current heir (often the Bastard, but sometimes other players) made all the decisions without even holding a vote.

Okay, so that's an overview of the rules. Now, how do you win?

There are supposed to be seven turns (we played 6) and each character has different win conditions that you check at the end of Turn Seven to see who becomes King. The problem was that some win conditions were much more interesting than others. There were easy ones and harder ones, which was fine, but the boring ones were the ones that made things less interesting than they could be.

These were all pretty good:

-- The Bastard and the Queen are fighting over the heirdom.
-- The Archbishop wants the Steward to be heir.
-- The Steward, I think, can't be the heir.

These were kinda lame:

-- The Baron and the Ambassador are fighting over this insurrection that is taking place, which proceeds kinda like the quests in Shadows Over Camelot, with them both progressing towards the same goal from different directions. The problem was that their struggle rarely seemed to affect the rest of what was going on in play (as far as I could tell), so the other characters didn't really pay that much attention to what they were doing.

-- The Treasurer wins if they have the most Status. This is not really related to anything, leaving the Treasurer the odd man out and also with one special ability (involving bidding for Status Cards) that none of us could really understand, even after pondering it for 15 minutes.

That said, the game was still pretty fun. I feel like there's a really good game in there somewhere, but, like Once Upon a Time, some of the rules seem to be tripping the game up or keeping it from reaching its full potential. It needs less different kinds of resources and special abilities and more reasons for characters to be involved with each other, whether it's in love or hate. It needs less bickering and more of Luke's "Viking Funeral," more ways for characters to take dramatic actions that put them in the spotlight.

Anyway, I hope we get the chance to play it again at some point, now that we understand the rules better. Changing the way Councils go would help some, I think, but I don't know if it's going to be enough to make this a perennial favorite instead of just something to play once or twice a year.

There's just a few too many fiddly bits here, but it's still a really fun set up, and I had a great time being screwed out of the royalty. I'm impressed by the different novel game elements LLTK puts together.

As Meej mentioned, this game really requires a huge amount of knowledge on the part of the players. Being an effective Treasurer requires you to have every status card in the game memorized, for example. Every player needs to understand the unique, hidden mechanics of every other player for play and counterplay to work. Every player needs to understand all the player mechanics and Status cards to properly use the Intrigue cards, and, in turn, must have the Intrigue cards memorized to properly use the other mechanics. To top it off, there aren't enough rounds of play for the randomness in the council's decision-making system to average out, so you might very well lose without having any real chance to do anything about it.

So, yeah, I think it's a beta.

It was really fiddley to be a larp, but then I feel that way about old school MET too. Who had time to roleplay when you're fiddling all the time?

Posted By: misubaI fear that the five-or-more-players specification will mean it's stillborn in the marketplace.

You wouldn't be wrong...

For the sake of offering solutions in addition to highlighting problems, I'd also like to mention that Johnathan's analysis was spot-on:

"It needs less different kinds of resources and special abilities and more reasons for characters to be involved with each other, whether it's in love or hate. It needs less bickering and more of Luke's "Viking Funeral," more ways for characters to take dramatic actions that put them in the spotlight."

I completely agree. I'd go with this for a first pass: pick two resources that the game currently has - let's say Favor and Money. Throw out all the other fiddly bits. Map any interesting interactions they had with Favor or Money onto the Character rules, core rules, or the Favor and Money rules. Now you've got a game where the players are much more likely to come into direct interaction and conflict.

Anyway, just my first thoughts on the matter.

Posted By: Eric
p.s. We don't have access to the Intrigue cards right now, but we really hope that one of them lets you Petition to change the heir. Many Characters depend on it, but no Character has the ability to Petition to do it and there isn't a mechanic for it in the rulebook - except maybe for the Bastard, who starts as the heir and (maybe) can Petition to have himself become the heir (again?).

The rest of it aside - haven't given the PDF rulebook as close a read as you did, just searched it for "heir" because this confused the heck out of me also - the Bastard loses his heir status if his Favor falls below 2. The Queen('s son) loses Heir status similarly - I'd assume she automatically becomes or can petition to become Regent/Heir if the Bastard falls out of Favor. I have no idea if there are intrigue cards to affect those in another way than through Favor or not. (The questions asked on WW's forum about the game helped a little.)

Apparently the game, for those that want "No Heir," is expected to go: Discredit the Bastard, discredit the Queen, then fill your own condition.

But yeah, the one thing I'd definitely do against the rulebook's instructions is to make Favor transparent, and visible to the players. If a given Diplomacy phase is supposed to represent a day or longer anyhow, it'll be clear enough who the King is favoring. (And if we'd been playing the impacts of Status behavior on Favor as intended, I don't think the Bastard would have lasted long at all, but that's a bit of an aside...)

- D.J.

Fanmail for Hamlet reference.

We're totally playtesting Ben's games once he gets his ass here. And I've been eyeing Shreyas' In Darkness He is Waiting and the newish version of Snow From Korea for several weeks now. And then there's the games for Push 2...

Robert (Bob?), I think that it's a compliment to the game that it's being reviewed here so. That is, I think that, despite it's seeming problems that there's a core of a game here that's very attractive. I think people want it to work. So the heavy deconstruction is meant to say, "Give it another try, and we'll love LLTK2!"

I'd try it, that's sure.

Mike