Board Game Review - Paladins of the West Kingdom

Chivalry isn't dead

I’ve already reviewed a good number of Garphill games, but I think Paladins of the West Kingdom may be my very favorite of them all. Paladins was my introduction to Garphill and their unique brand of deeply strategic worker games with lots of variety. Smack in the middle of their medieval trilogies, Paladins is as sharp and satisfying as later entries like Scholars of the South Tigris or Viscounts of the West Kingdom while remaining relatively simple like predecessors Architects of the West Kingdom and Raiders of the North Sea. While Garphill games have generally trended toward more complicated rules and intricate strategies, Paladins in the middle strikes the perfect balance.

Unlike most worker placement games, the only person who’s really going to be able to mess you up here is you. It’s a bit more of a solitaire than other games from Garphill, but it presents such a satisfying and interesting puzzle to solve that it’s hard to really begrudge it. The cleverest thing Paladins does is find multiple ways to utilize the same systems. You will, over the course of the game, collect red, blue, and black banners representing esoteric qualities of your kingdom and how well you’ve done in a given field. In order to advance on each of these tracks, you’ll need to perform particular actions, each of which generally requires having a high enough value in another track. As such, your banners will leapfrog past each other and generally make it very difficult to specialize in just one thing.

Each round you’ll get a handful of workers of different colors, from the Tavern cards everyone drafts from, as well as from the specific Paladin card you’ll choose to play that round. Paladin cards also give you temporary bonuses to the three tracks mentioned earlier, as well as a free perk for that round which usually involves performing some action free of charge. There’s already an enormous amount of strategy involved in what Paladin you pick — generally, you’ll want to be able to make good use of whatever its special power is that round rather than waste them too early before you can properly capitalize on the discounts they can provide.

With the workers you take, you’ll then perform a number of fairly simple actions, taking turns until everyone has passed. On the left side of your player boards are the simpler actions: gather food, hire townspeople, turn a worker of any color into a wildcard purple (at the cost of committing some light crimes), or “pray” on a spot to take workers off it and make it available to use again. Over on the right side are the six advanced options. Each of these requires workers of a specific color, and is color-coordinated in a handy and ingenious way: each one of them requires you to have a certain amount on one of the three colored tracks, and provides gains on a different one. So if you want to use some of your red points to get black points, you’ll be taking the Garrison action, whereas if you instead want to use some blue points to get black ones, you’ll be Absolving. It’s important to note that you never actually spend the points on those tracks, you just have to be past certain thresholds in order to perform those actions, which get higher the more you do them.

Up on the center board are a few different elements. First, there are the townsfolk you can either hire to provide an ongoing passive bonus to you or send away for a one-time effect. Similarly, there are Outsider cards that you can either Attack (using red points to gain blue) or Convert (black for red). On the same board as those Outsiders are the spaces you’ll be sending tokens to when you Garrison (red for black) or Commission (black for blue), and the red or black values those spaces require are the same as the ones required to interact with the Outsider cards near them. Also on the center board are the King’s Orders — three different actions that will give you extra points at game’s end if you perform them five times — and the King’s Favor, extra spaces you can throw workers on for great benefit. The latter are more like traditional worker placement spaces: first come, first served.

Finally on the center board is the tax stand, a collection of coins that you’ll be taking from every time you gain a purple (wildcard) worker and are forced to draw a Suspicion card. Whenever the last coin gets taken from the taxes, an Inquisition occurs, and whoever has the most Suspicion cards has to take a nasty Debt, which will lose them points unless they can pay it off with advanced actions. This gives a neat disincentive for making things too easy — sure, you could just get as many purple workers as you can to make your planning simpler and provide you more options on your turn, but if you do it too much you run the risk of collecting Debt cards, which of course nobody wants (unless you can pay it off to turn those negatives into a positive).

Paladins also has a neat little bit of engine-building with the Develop action, which lets you spend a few bucks to make one of your advanced actions require one less worker for the rest of the game. Once you really get going, you’ll be able to reap the instant rewards from each of the advanced actions, such as getting extra cash, provisions, or workers, and dovetail those into your future turns in the round. Soon enough you’ll be grabbing new workers, using Pray to clear off your action spaces, utilizing the resource discount on your chosen Paladin, activating the passive bonuses on your Townsfolk, and pulling off crazy rounds where you get to Fortify your wall five times or build three Garrisons on the center board. Those moments of synergy when a plan successfully comes together are when Paladins is at its most satisfying.

While it can get a bit tricky in terms of how the different actions all tie together, what they require, and what they provide, the iconography in Paladins is damn near perfect, and simple enough that I could pick up the game and teach it to someone without even having to reference the rulebook. This isn’t to be understated, either — for a game as relatively complex as it is, Paladins of the West Kingdom is brutally easy to understand, though much more difficult to master. Of course, I’d be more than happy to indulge it anytime.