This is a sponsored review.

Overview & How to Play

In Antares Kingdoms, watch your friends take their turns on YOUR turns in this game to have the best kingdom within 1.5 hours.

So on each turn, or year, all you do is 2 actions, like drawing cards, or playing a card in your hand! Playing cards will load up cards to the right side of your player sheet in a queue. This queue will progress over each year to eventually go into your kingdom, which is the left side of your player sheet. Once officially in your kingdom, these cards, like Grain Fields, Quarries, Knights, or Towns, can be triggered for their special abilities.

This action part of the game is entirely simultaneous, so everyone takes their turns at once. After everyone is done with their 2 actions, you prepare for the end of year event, which when flipped, reveals an attack against everyone’s kingdoms, or a bountiful harvest for all, and players can get more cash based off of sets of cards in their kingdoms.

Oh yeah, these sets of cards in your kingdoms are also very important because sets at the end of each decade of 10 years/turns are tallied up, and provide points to players. 6 Town cards makes up 2 sets of Towns, giving a player 2 points come decade end in that Town category. At the end of 3 decades, players will all use any ‘Dominion’ cards they have purchased with gold to secretly boost each category, and whoever has the most points out of all the categories combined wins the game!

Pros

Antares Kingdom really is medieval romping, with the class progression system to become Trade Masters, or if you want, eventual Kings that can make even more money! Many cards are split into two horizontally, letting you imagine using them for different things in your kingdom.

The ‘progress’ mechanic of moving cards slowly down, then to the left of your player sheet feels very thematic and natural. Your kingdom is always having new stuff, even though each player only takes 2 actions a turn to keep things snappy.

There’s a ton of ‘free’ actions loaded onto the 2 action baseline though, with exhausting Peasants to kick them from your kingdom to the progression queue, using Towns to sell off supply tokens, to all of the free action opportunity cards you can draw and play from hand.

The main player interaction has to come with the cheeky push-your-luck element, where you could pay money to ‘Foresee’, and look ahead at the end of round card. That could be a lovely Harvest, or a terrible Warfare that people should defend against. If you ‘Forsaw’ this, you can bluff about it to your friends!

End game remains interesting, with players using the ‘Dominion’ cards they’ve been buying to attempt to boost their end game categories. One can even win the game by having a ridiculous amount of 2nd place wins of categories, so there’s some of mind games and uncertainty at the end, especially with bigger groups.

Cons & Nitpicks

Alas, there were some woes (publisher expects to have an updated version come July 2022).

Making sets can be initially confusing, which is kind of the main point of the game that needs to be front and center. And while the rulebook looks good, it really has some sequencing issues.

There’s actually asymmetry in this game, with 12 factions! Some are cool, but some are really bleh. We were concerned with balance from seeing a faction called Kiled, who could draw 3 cards every time they draw, and in addition to that, they can discard a card to gain a gold for FREE!?? That’s two great advantages baked into one card, where most factions have one. Other factions like House Mallard practically have 0 effect on gameplay.

Then, our most notable nitpick is the simultaneous play. It flows smoothly, but makes the game feel more solitaire than the mechanics promise: there’s currently no way to interfere with each other’s kingdoms, hands, etc, AND the game doesn’t have a central board you’re competing over. You are never encouraged a window to actually watch what people are doing… which can get weird with the bluffing mechanic of trying to ‘Forsee’ upcoming cards and lying about it… if no one else is paying attention to you.

Final Thoughts

We settle on the simultaneous turns working for a low stress environment, that doesn’t put pressure on lying, and lets you banter like crazy with medieval jokes, that is if you’re the friend group that would.