Valeria Card Kingdoms: Review

Play as a Duke to save your kingdom by collecting citizens, fighting monsters, and capturing domains in Valeria Card Kingdoms, a super fun card-drafting, deck building card game by Daily Magic Games.File_003

Valeria Card Kingdoms play 1-5 players, and lasts about 30-45 minutes. The rulebook was really easy to understand, and explains how to set the game up very well. The game comes with different types of cards, dividers for the cards to keep them organized in the box, and the box is large enough to handle the cards plus a good amount of expansions.

Players play as Dukes who earn bonuses at the end of the game. The goal of the game is to be the player who earns the most victory points. Players collect
cards throughout the game, building their deck, in hopes of having the most victory points at the end of the game.

File_004At the beginning of each turn, each player rolls two D6 dice, provided to you in the game. Depending on the face of the dice will determine what resource tokens which players receive. Then, the active player gets to take two actions. Players may choose of the two actions to either turn in strength resource tokens to fight monsters, turn in gold resource tokens to either recruit citizens, or turn in gold resource tokens to collect domains. If a player can’t do any of those options, they may also collect resource tokens they need. There is a third resource token, the magic resource token, which is most often used as a wild token, but some cards may require it specifically.

The game is set up really simply with the rule book’s instructions. Monster cards on top, citizen cards in the middle two rows, and domain cards on the bottom.

The cards that offer victory points in the game vary. Most often it is defeated monsters who offer victory points. However, some domain cards and some citizen cards may also offer victory points. 

File_000I enjoyed this game for many reasons.

  1. Rulebook was super easy to understand.
  2. Box left plenty of space for expansions, and provided everything you need to play and stay organized.
  3. Resource tokens are very nice wooden tokens, which I always prefer to plastic pieces.
  4. The game offers different ways to play which all can lead to winning, depending on how the player chooses synergies.
  5. Players don’t know who will win the game until the end of the game, so a runaway leader is highly unlikely to present itself.
  6. File_002There are in-game reference cards. These are crucial and without them can really make for a rough game. I’m happy to see they included them, as well as dividers to organize them!

My husband and I like the game enough to decide to purchase some of the expansions that they have, such as King’s Guard, and Villages of Valeria.

A+ game! I definitely suggest you take a look at the game if you enjoy card deck building games. I’ll be at Gen Con 2016 this year run game demonstrations of Valeria, come find me at the Indie Game Alliance booth!

Cassie Elle

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