KingDomino - tiny empire building

A while back, I got Kingdomino from Barnes & Noble.  It was so colorful, and we didn't have any games yet that wrapped a theme around domino-style play.  It turned out that I actually bought a deluxe edition which included a Royal Bonus Pack and the Giants Expansion.

 Let's stick to the base game for now.  We got the domino selection rules wrong the first time around, but once we got the scoring worked out, there was a fun little genius behind this one.  The tiles have numbers on the back, 1 through 48.  The higher numbers are tiles that will probably score higher but be harder to place in your layout.

You start with a home tile and a little 3-d castle to put there.  Then the goal is to build a 5x5 kingdom with adjoining areas of matching terrain.  Each domino shows two terrain tiles.  Say you end up with four connected desert tiles, and one of the tiles shows two crowns ... you get 4x2 points at the end of the hand.

That's it. For two players, you only use 24 tiles.  There are additional rules with bonuses like +5 if your castle ends up in the exact center, or +10 if you build a clean, complete 5x5 layout with no gaps.

The other main rule is how you get your tiles.  You line up four dominoes, face down (numbers showing), sort them by numbers, then roll your meeples to see which order you play.  Flip the dominoes, put the meeples on the dominoes, and play in the order the meeples tell you.  Then each turn you 1) play the domino in your hand and 2) take the next domino.  When you take a domino, you take your meeple off that domino and put it on your choice of the next domino, and keep refilling the rows of dominos from the stack.

That is enough to make a pleasant bit of strategy.  You can see what the other player is going to get next, and try to get the best tiles for your own layout.  The way it ends up working is that if you pick the highest-point domino (last in the lineup), you end up delaying your own next turn.  Some subtle results from such a simple idea.

Endearing graphics, especially in the Giants pack.  I love the one with the giant trying to drink the ocean with a straw.  There is a dragon skeleton in the desert, Nessie swimming in the double-water domino, a range of fun details throughout.  Even the boxes are fun to look at, so many little characters up to so much mischief.

About those extras: 

The Royal set just gives you stickers for your meeples and four more colorful castles.

The Giants expansion is big, with a 3-d tower that acts as a domino dispenser, a bunch of new dominos with new symbols, and a bunch of dominoes showing secret goals you can use to get extra points.  The new symbols are: giants and footprints.  When you place a domino with a giant, you have to put one of the little giants on one of your crowns, which means the crown does not count for points.  And if you play a footprint, you can move a giant from one of your crowns to an opponent's crown (I think).  A few extra variables to think about. 

In the end, it comes down to scoring your land areas: number of crowns times the number of connected spaces.

This game is a winner.