Renegade Game Studios - Viscounts of The West Kingdom (RGS2127), 1-4 Players, Ages 12 and Up, 60-90 min, Strategy Board Game Night for Teens, Adults - Be The Player with The Most Victory Points

Played a few times prior to buying it. Each game was better than the previous one. Everything works well together in the game and the instructions, although a bit long, make sense. The pieces are high quality, the cards and tiles have good artwork and are of good construction. This game will be a good "go-to" when someone says "It doesn't matter what we play."In typical Amazon fashion, for some reason, the game box is always damaged. Usually at least one corner of the box is damaged, sometimes 2 corners.

Great addiction to the Garphill Games collection

Viscounts offers 3 different tracks that you can pursue to achieve victory points and gain resources (constructing buildings, acquiring manuscripts and working in the castle). For the most part, these tracks are completely independent. In fact, it probably makes most sense to focus on only one of them (two at most) rather than working on all 3.Arguably, being able to pursue these different tracks adds to Viscounts' replayability, but I didn't really find this to be the case. I only found the castle track remotely interesting -- adding workers there can create some cool (but fiddly) cascading effects.I found the disconnected nature of these tracks far less interesting than the interconnected activities of Paladins and found the latter a far more brain burning and enjoyable game. Paladins might just be my favorite game of all time, while Viscounts might not even be good enough to stay in my collection.

Great product. Fast shipping

This game is everything I had hoped it to be. I watched many Youtube videos which explained and showed the game. It didn't disappoint!

I love all the "The West Kingdom" games, and this is my new favorite. It may be a little challenging for a non-gamer to pick up, but anyone who has played euro-style games should pick it up in no time.

I had a bit of a “meh” reaction to the solo play in Paladins of the West Kingdom, which was the first game in the WK series that I tried, but how did Viscounts fare? Let’s get to the review!MIX, 2.5 out of 5: A.I. VARIETY. On the positive side, the solo A.I. is pretty cool in that you can have 4 different opponents, and if you find the game too easy (fat chance!), you can give the A.I. more powerful cards. Overall, I really like how they included 4 different A.I. Now the reason this point is a mix is because they don’t actually play that differently in terms of how they impact the player. Sure, you might be able to mess with some things they do a bit more, and there might be a different kind of pace to the game based on what kind of game they’re playing, but there’s not such a huge difference between these A.I. opponents overall that will make you think they’re all amazingly unique.PRO, 5 out of 5: RUNNING THE A.I. Just to be clear, I tend to like automa and A.I.’s that model a real player, maybe with some bonuses or different ways they play, instead of ones that are really abstracted or just beating your own score. In Viscounts, I must say that the A.I. models another player in so many ways. Everything you can do to an actual player works here, and the A.I. has almost all the same mechanisms as you. It plays so smoothly, too. Overall, it’s just a very quick to resolve, pleasurable A.I. to play against. The one knock I might give is towards the end game when the A.I. has a lot of powers unlocked and it could be a little tough to keep track of everything. Besides that, the A.I. itself is great.PRO, 5 out of 5: VIRTUE AND CORRUPTION. As you take different actions, shuffle your deck, and hire new people into your deck, these virtue and corruption tokens will move on a track. When they meet, debt or deed cards may be drawn depending on where the tokens come together. This can also have an effect on other players. All of this is really cool because it gives you juicy choices to make. For example, do you want to go really heavy on criminals that move your tracker to the right, or do you want to get more virtuous people? You also have to pay attention to what the A.I. is doing, which is perhaps the biggest intersection between the A.I. and the player that's really neat. On top of that, the deeds and debt cards that I mentioned above serve as the timer of the game. Controlling them controls the entire pace of when the game will end. This works really well for both multiplayer and solo.PRO, 5 out of 5: CARD ROW. So your turns in this game are super simple. You basically just slide all your cards down in the row, play a new card, move your viscount pawn a bit, take an action, and done. But that choice of which card to play is very interesting and consistently engaging. First of all, the card you play will have a value in the upper left corner that says how far you can move in the round, which will totally change in many ways the actions available to you. The cards you play will also have icons, and you’ll want to chain icons of the same type together to pull off really big actions and big bonuses. But then you need to figure out when you want to transition and how to kind of skim through your deck to get the right combos built at the right times. Altogether, this is just a really fun card-play system. It stays fresh and feels unique each time you play with how your engine works out.PRO, 5 out of 5: ENGINE UPGRADES. So Viscounts is mainly a deck-builder. You have all these cards around the board with a ton of information to see what your upgrading options might be, and you can add these cards into your deck. Viscounts ultimately feels like a really impactful deck-builder because every time you play a card that you bought, it will stick around for 3 turns and continue to influence things for all of those turns. The upgrading doesn’t stop there, however. Oh no! You can also build buildings (each with a bonus), you can acquire manuscripts that will eventually give you big bonuses, and you can go into the central castle to get extra resources and things from there. The upgrading and victory paths in this game are my favorite parts of Euros in general because I can hyper-focus on something, but I also have the ability to “spread my wings” to other areas. Getting a bonus here will then make my actions better over there, to give an example, so I really like how all this functions and ties together.OVERALL SCORE, 5 out of 5. Overall, I was really surprised by Viscounts of the West Kingdom. Again, I thought that Paladins was just ok at best, but for ME, Viscounts is just a great Euro game. Now I really don’t like Euros that much, but this one really impressed me. As for you, I think this one might be a game to check out if you like deck-builders, games with a rondel mechanism with pawn movement, if you enjoy A.I. that feel like a real human player, or if you like varied upgrade and victory point paths that allow you to focus on a single path in one game. On the other hand, you might want to avoid Viscounts if you like more abstracted A.I. where you don’t have to track a lot of information for them, or if you like constant in-your-face competition with the A.I. because a lot of times this game can feel like multiplayer solitaire. There are points of intersection, but you’ll often just be able to do what you want to do without really worrying about the A.I.Happy gaming! This is Dr. D, and I’m out!

Was a strike out for my family. I was looking forward to this one but it was overly "complex" and not as engaging as, say, Raiders of Scythia, from the same publisher. Hard to get to the table for us. Likely will get traded or sold