Kingdoms is a German-style board game

German-style board game

German-style board games, frequently referred to in gaming circles as Euro Games or Euro-style, are a broad class of tabletop games that generally have simple rules, short to medium playing times, indirect player interaction and abstract physical components...

 for 2-4 players designed by Reiner Knizia

Reiner Knizia

Reiner Knizia is a prolific German-style board game designer. Born in Germany, he developed his first game at the age of eight. He has a PhD in mathematics, and has been a full-time game designer since 1997, when he quit his job from the board of a large international bank...

 and released in 2002 by Fantasy Flight

Fantasy flight

Fantasy flights are charity flights operated by a host airline for locally disadvantaged and terminally ill children to fly to a fictitious destination.The destination is often the North Pole, the home of Santa Claus' workshop...

. The game is based on Knizia's original German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 game Auf Heller und Pfennig, but has been given a Medieval Fantasy

Fantasy

Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...

 theme.

In 2003, Kingdoms won the Origins Award

Origins Award

The Origins Awards are American awards for outstanding work in the game industry. They are presented by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design at the Origins Game Fair on an annual basis for the previous year, so the 1979 awards were given at the 1980 Origins.The Origins Award is commonly...

 for Best Abstract Board Game of 2002.

Rules

Players take turns drawing tiles from a stack and laying them on an orthogonal grid, representing a kingdom being settled. Tiles can be either resources (with value +1 to +6) or hazards (-1 to -6). The sum of all tile values on a row or column determines the score for that row or column. A special case is the mountain tile, which splits the row and column it occupies into two, so that each section is scored separately.

Players may also play castle tiles, ranked 1 through 4. To score points from a row or column, a player must have a castle there; castles score the points of the row and column they occupy times the rank of the castle. This score may be a negative number. A player has a limited number of castles; castles other than rank 1 cannot be reused.

There are two special tiles, besides the mountain tile mentioned above: the dragon

Dragon

A dragon is a legendary creature, typically with serpentine or reptilian traits, that feature in the myths of many cultures. There are two distinct cultural traditions of dragons: the European dragon, derived from European folk traditions and ultimately related to Greek and Middle Eastern...

and the gold mine. The dragon negates all resources in the row and column it occupies, leaving only the hazards. A gold mine doubles the value of that row and column.

When the grid has been filled, the round ends, rows and columns are scored and each player earns points. The board is emptied and play continues for three rounds.

Strategy

Players cannot move tiles once they have been placed. They must also play their castle tiles when there are still empty places on the board, else they risk not scoring the best rows and columns. This requires tactical thinking; each player must balance the need to score points with the risk of having their valuable castles negated with a dragon or hazard tile later in the round.