Game Review: King of Siam

By Patrick Korner
September 11, 2008

Publisher: Histogame
Designer: Peer Sylvester
Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Rules Language: German and English

Some games arrive at your doorstep chock-full of plastic minis, cardboard counters, game boards, player boards, resource boards, wooden cubes, wooden cylinders, wooden dodecahedrons… well, you get the point. Magpie effect in full gear, you rush to open the box and revel in the sheer mass of gaming paraphernalia the good folks at Brand X Game Company have provided you with.

King of Siam is not one of those games.

Some games arrive at your doorstep in a decidedly minimalist manner. You open the box, look over the relatively meagre array of bits and pieces and, although you know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, mutter a quick “That’s it?” under your breath. But as you delve into the rules and see the sheer elegance and polish that the minimalist approach demands, you begin to realize how, in some cases, a game can be more, much more than the sum of its bits.

King of Siam is one of those games.

The King and You

King of Siam is a 2-4 player area influence game designed by Peer Sylvester (who has previously seen several of his game-related efforts, including the books Jam Dudel and So Spielt Die Welt, published by Bambus Spieleverlag). The game is set in Siam, as you might expect from the title, and features the tense battles between rival factions around the time when British colonialism was knocking on the door of the Kingdom. Players can back the various factions (hopefully having the greatest interest in the winning faction at the end of the game), but can also try to play spoiler, allowing the British to take over and hopefully win by having the most balanced interest in all three factions.

The game itself comes with a smallish board of Siam showing eight provinces – these are the provinces the players contend for. Each province has a cardboard tile to match, and these tiles are placed face-up in a vertical column along the left-hand edge of the board. This column will define the order in which the provinces are resolved (top to bottom). Three of the provinces are defined as “home” provinces for the three factions (represented in the game by red, blue and yellow cubes) and are pre-seeded with two cubes in the appropriate colour to start the game. Random cubes are then drawn to fill each province to a total of four cubes, so five provinces have four random cubes on them, and three will have two random cubes and two specified colour cubes each on them.

Each player gets a set of eight action cards, six of which are unique and two of which are duplicates. These actions for the most part allow you to manipulate the cubes on the board – you can add cubes, move cubes around, etc., in accordance with what each specific card lets you do. I won’t go over each of the cards in detail since there is little to be gained from doing so except to mention that one of the cards is a little different – rather than change the cubes about, you are allowed to switch the order of two province tiles in the column on the board, thus changing the order in which the provinces are resolved. Furthermore, you get to place a marker on one of the two tiles you switched, preventing other players from re-switching that tile.

Finally, each player draws a summary card which highlights the key rules (including the differing victory conditions) and also indicates which cubes that player will have in front of themselves at the start of the game. As the game progresses players get to choose which cubes to add to their collection, but the starting cubes are pre-set, presumably to avoid overly skewed starting combinations.

On a player’s turn, she can choose to do one of two things: play an action card or pass. Once a player passes, she has no choice but to watch until the province whose fate is currently being decided is settled. If a player plays an action card, she carries out the card’s action, then takes one cube from anywhere on the board (which could easily be one of the cubes she just placed), adding it to those in front of herself. That’s it.

Once all players pass, the control of the province is determined: whichever colour has the most followers (cubes) in that province “wins” the province; all cubes are removed and a faction marker of the winning faction is added to the province. Should two colours tie for majority, then the factions lose out and the British gain control of the province instead – the cubes are still removed but in this instance a British control marker is added to the province instead. In either case play in that province is now closed – that province’s tile is flipped upside down and the players turn their attention to the next tile in line.

Simple and elegant, but with one major catch: Remember how each player has only eight action cards? And how the gameboard has eight provinces? This is area majority distilled down to its purest form – like, say, El Grande except each region is scored only once, there’s no Castillo, there’s no competition over who plays first (it’s always whoever played last in the previous province) and there’s no Grande. Players walk a tightrope right from the beginning, since it’s nearly impossible to be able to positively influence each and every province while still managing your remaining cards in hand. Over the course of the game, players can try to temporarily (and unofficially) align themselves with their opponents – riding another player’s coattails, as it were – or goad the others into committing too many resources (i.e. cards) to the fight, thus weakening themselves in the late game. Or they spend all the resources they can early on, building a strong lead and hoping it stays good. Or they spend very little early and try to wield the hammer late. Or… well, you get the point. For such a minimalist game, there are a wealth of things to try to do.

One final aspect of the game to describe is how to sort out the winner. First, check to see which faction has the most influence markers on the board (i.e. won the most provinces). That faction wins, and the player with the most cubes in that faction’s colour is the winner. If there are tied factions, then the tied faction to win a province last wins. If there are tied players, then the tied player with the majority of second-place cubes wins. If there is STILL a tie (and here the game gets a bit fiddly out of necessity), the tied player who played an action card last loses. Ouch.

There’s one other way the game can end: When all four British control markers are on the board, the factions all lose, the British win, and the winning player is the player with the most sets of coloured cubes. (Think of the victory point calculation for Reiner Knizia’s Tigris & Euphrates or Ingenious.) Note that this can happen earlier than round 8, in which case the game simply ends early.

King Me?

As you might have guessed, I’m a big fan of this game. It’s wonderfully tense for a quick little 45-minute game, and the production values are top notch – the cards are big and easy to read, and the iconography that defines what each card can do is easy to understand. Best of all is the fact that the four-player version of the game is a partnership version – you and your partner sit opposite each other and vie in tandem for the right to rule the Kingdom (and, presumably sip as many umbrella drinks on the beaches of Koh Samui as you can stand). The two- and three-player games are “every player for herself” and are equally enjoyable. In short, this is a top tier game.

One complaint I’ve heard voiced about the game is that it’s quite pricy for what you get. This is undeniably true – compare this game to Wings of War, for example, and you’ll see that it’s about 1.5 times the cost. (At least, this was the case at the fairly large online retailer I checked while writing this review.) I’m not in a position to argue the cost calculations the publisher no doubt had to run when deciding whether to print the game or not, but I will laud Histogame for not succumbing to Over-Inflated Box Syndrome and releasing this in a bigger box just to try to justify the cost. We’ve seen enough of that over the past few years that it’s quite nice to see a publisher avoid the trend. For me the game is well worth the investment, but as always your mileage may vary. Hopefully I’ve managed to provide enough detail to let you, gentle reader, make a decision as to whether this is a game you’d enjoy.

The other complaint I’ve seen is that there isn’t enough to the game – in short, it’s too quick and you have too few options. I just don’t see this, and can only assume that those making those claims were looking for a different game than the one King of Siam offers. There’s certainly a place on my shelves for the bigger, chromier (is that a word?) area majority game, and thankfully I have several games that scratch that itch – certainly that’s not the type of game I think King of Siam to be!

Overall, I would heartily recommend King of Siam to the thoughtful Eurogamer. Ameritrash fans should probably run far, far away from this one – it’s pretty much the antithesis of the type of game the Ameritrash genre typifies. It’s also not a game for those seeking a longer, more drawn out strategy game, as the game’s pace forces you into making decisions quickly, with little room for recovery should an early choice go awry. But as mentioned above, when you’re looking for a pure hit of Eurogaming bliss, you can do far worse than King of Siam.

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