Monthly Archives: June 2026

In Theory

In Theory: AI Art In Board Games

While I generally try to avoid controversy on this site and stick to what I enjoy most, reviewing games, talking about games and, well… more games, now and then a subject comes along that is simply impossible to ignore.

This is one of those subjects.

As someone who reviews board games, I’m increasingly running into games that use AI-generated artwork, which means I have to make a decision about how I’m going to treat them. Do I ignore it? Mention it? Penalize it? Celebrate it? Pretend it isn’t there and hope nobody notices?

Sooner or later, I have to put my cards on the table, explain my position and live with the consequences. The internet being what it is, remaining silent makes you complicit, while saying anything at all guarantees that one tribe or the other will decide you’re the villain of the week. It’s a remarkable system we’ve built for ourselves in which you are always left with a lose-lose scenario.

I’ve touched on AI artwork in a few previous reviews, most recently Syncanite Foundation and Kingdom Legacy, and those conversations have helped me work out where I stand. But scattered comments buried inside reviews aren’t enough anymore. I need to make dealing with AI art work part of my rating system, so that I can respond to it in an objective and fair way.

So this article will be the official GamersDungeon position on AI artwork in board games, how I’m going to approach it as a reviewer and, most importantly, how it will impact the rating/scores that games receive going forward.

The Controversy

Unless you’ve been hiding under a particularly large and comfortable rock, you’re probably aware that AI is everywhere. In the tabletop hobby, and especially in board games, role playing games and miniature games, AI-generated artwork has become one of the most divisive subjects around.

Mention it in a comment section, and you’ll usually have enough material for a three-day flame war.

While there are dozens of individual arguments and plenty of grey areas, the debate generally revolves around three major points.

The first is that generative AI art is fundamentally a form of theft. The argument is that AI models are trained on existing artwork created by real artists and then produce derivative images without permission, attribution or compensation. In other words, the machine is standing on the shoulders of artists who never agreed to hold it up.

Adobe Firefly combats Generative AI theft by training it’s AI on public domain images and images willingly provided by artists. This is just one of many unique methods that put to question the argument that Generative AI images are theft. Hence the problem with this argument.

The second argument is economic. Every AI image used by a publisher is potentially one less commission for a human artist. If a company can generate an illustration in minutes instead of paying an illustrator, more profit stays with the publisher, while fewer opportunities exist for the people who built the artistic foundation AI relies upon. To critics, it isn’t just replacing jobs, it’s replacing them with something built from the work of those same artists.

Finally, there is the quality argument. Critics often describe AI art as soulless, repetitive, and creatively hollow, produced by systems that consume enormous amounts of computing power and energy simply to flood the internet with an endless stream of technically competent but artistically disposable images. The term AI slop didn’t appear out of nowhere.

There are plenty of smaller arguments, edge cases and philosophical rabbit holes that could fill an entire series of articles, but these three points are the heavy hitters. If I can explain where I stand on them, then I can also explain how AI artwork will be treated in reviews here on GamersDungeon going forward.

First, however, we have to talk about the elephant in the room.

Circumstances Matter

I’ve never had much patience for ivory tower thinking or the modern habit of treating every issue like it’s a football match where you have to pick a side and spend the next six months screaming at the other team.

The real world is a lot messier than that.

Real people have real jobs, real businesses, real families and real bills to pay. Artists, publishers, designers, consumers and even the people building AI tools all have different incentives and different circumstances. Any position that completely ignores one side in favour of ideological purity is, in my opinion, more interested in winning an argument than solving a problem.

Kingdom Legacy and Fryxelius Games is a great example of circumstances mattering. This is a family run business of creative people who are doing their best to bring great games to us. They however like all businesses have to make compromises. In the case of Kingdom Legacy, your talking about producing art for 140 quardruple sided cards requiring around 500 images for a game that can’t cost more than 10-15 bucks for it to be marketable. Had Fryxelius games hired an artist to create these images this game would never see the light of day and if it did it would cost more than anyone would be willing to pay for a game that is effectively a box with 140 cards in it.

That isn’t particularly useful to me.

So I’m not going to approach AI artwork from the perspective of absolute morality, nor am I going to pretend that technological progress can simply be wished away. My position has to account for the many people affected by it, which means it’s inevitably going to be a compromise.

To put it plainly, I’m not taking the easy route of saying “I refuse to review games with AI art” and I’m equally not going to shrug and say “I don’t care, embrace the future.”

Somewhere between those two extremes is a position that I think is both fair and practical. Whether you ultimately agree with it or not, I think it’s worth explaining how I arrived there before I tell you what the policy will be.

AI Art is Stealing

This is probably the biggest argument against AI-generated art, and it’s also the one I find the hardest to apply in practice.

Not because I know it isn’t true, but because I don’t know that it is.

I’m not an AI engineer, and I’m certainly not qualified to explain exactly what every image model is doing behind the scenes. More importantly, not every AI is trained the same way. Some models are trained on enormous collections of scraped images, while others are built from artwork that has been voluntarily submitted or properly licensed by the artists involved.

Those are very different situations.

A good example is Kingdom Legacy. After doing some research for that review, I discovered that the publisher uses an AI trained on artwork freely contributed by artists. If that’s the case, then the blanket statement that “AI art is theft” simply doesn’t apply.

The problem is that I can’t realistically investigate the AI training methods behind every game that uses AI-art I review, and even if I tried, publishers have no obligation to explain their workflow or be completely transparent about it.

So what am I supposed to do? Assume everyone is guilty until proven innocent? Or assume everyone is acting ethically until proven otherwise?

Neither approach seems particularly reasonable.

For that reason, I can’t base my review policy on the argument that AI art is inherently stealing. There are simply too many variables, too many different models and too many different ways of using the technology for me to conclude that every instance of generative AI is automatically unethical.

That’s not the same as saying the concern isn’t valid. It’s saying that, as a reviewer sitting behind a keyboard trying to decide whether a board game deserves a 3.5 or a 4, I don’t have enough information to make that judgment consistently or fairly.

So, for the most part, I set this argument aside. Not because I dismissed it, but because I don’t think it provides a practical foundation for a review policy.

They Took’ma’job!

I’m going to keep this one relatively short. Technology replaces people. It always has.

The printing press replaced scribes, photography replaced portrait painters, tractors replaced farm workers, digital distribution replaced video rental stores and the internet made life very uncomfortable for anyone who thought selling encyclopedias door to door was a long-term career plan.

We can resist it, protest it and argue about whether it’s a good thing, and sometimes those arguments are completely justified. History, however, has a habit of continuing anyway.

Dragonfoot Forums, one of the oldest D&D forums in existance has recently taken the decision to ban AI art from their forums and will moderate AI created material published through their site. This sort of reaction to AI art is common. Gamers everywhere are rejecting AI normalization and for good reason. Art is culture and AI is erasing it.

My personal philosophy has always been simple. Adapt and survive. Do I think it’s a good thing if artists lose work to AI? Absolutely not. But that isn’t actually what influences my reviews.

What influences my reviews is that I have yet to see AI-generated artwork that was worth replacing a human artist for in the first place.

That’s the important distinction.

I’m not making a moral judgment about technological progress. I’m making an artistic judgment about the end result.

And, quite frankly, I’m not impressed.

To me, AI artwork is shallow, repetitive and creatively uninteresting. I have no desire to sit here debating whether a particular image is “good AI” or “bad AI” any more than I want to debate whether instant coffee is “good coffee.” At best, it’s mediocre. At worst, it’s visual wallpaper that exists solely because someone needed a dragon by Tuesday afternoon.

Talent is something people develop over years of practice. Style is something people earn through experience, experimentation and failure. If the artwork in a game can be produced by me, my neighbour and a reasonably motivated golden retriever typing prompts into the same generator, then I struggle to assign much artistic value to it.

As a reviewer, that matters.

If I believe components contribute to the overall experience of a board game, then artwork is part of that equation, and artwork that I consider generic, uninspired or interchangeable should naturally be reflected in the score.

But even that isn’t really the heart of the issue.

The real reason AI art matters to me is something much more fundamental.

AI Art Has No Soul

This is the argument that ultimately matters to me.

I’ve already said that I’m unconvinced by the blanket claim that all AI art is theft and equally unconvinced that I can somehow stop technological progress by refusing to acknowledge it.

None of that changes the simple fact that I don’t like AI art. Not a little. Not “when it’s used badly.” I don’t like it at all.

The ecological cost, the enormous computing resources and the economic disruption only reinforce an opinion I already have, which is that the end result simply isn’t worth it. It’s an extraordinary amount of effort and energy being spent to produce something that, in my eyes, is artistically mediocre.

To me there is no masterpiece hiding inside AI-generated artwork, only different flavours of competent wallpaper. It can be technically impressive, visually striking and even useful, but I have yet to see anything that makes me stop and appreciate the person behind it.

Because there isn’t one.

Syncanite Foundation is one of those rare exceptions where I thought the AI art was well curated. It was the first review I ever did for a project with AI art however and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. In the end, I chose to just judge the art as I would any other, but it felt wrong. I don’t want to judge AI art, it felt empty, like I was speaking to a void rather than complimenting a persons hard work. This is what I want to avoid having to do in my reviews.

What makes art meaningful to me isn’t perfection. It’s the evidence that another human being sat down with a skill they spent years developing and created something that could only exist because they chose to make it. The mistakes, the style, the personality and even the imperfections are part of the experience.

That’s the soul.

AI removes the very thing I value most about art and replaces it with automation. It turns creativity into manufacturing, and while that may be efficient, efficiency has never been the quality that made me love board games, role playing games or miniature games in the first place.

So this is where I draw my line. Not because I think AI should be banned. Not because I think everyone who uses it is acting unethically. And not because I believe technology can be put back into the bottle.

But because, as a reviewer, I want to reward human creativity wherever I find it. Choosing a human artist over a prompt is, in my opinion, an investment in the very creative spirit that makes this hobby worth celebrating.

That’s my protest.

To me, replacing genuine artistic expression with AI artwork is like spray painting over a beautiful mural. The person holding the can may have perfectly reasonable motivations and the paint may even look neat from a distance, but something uniquely human has still been covered up in the process.

And that, more than any legal or economic argument, is why AI artwork will matter in my reviews.

Conclusion

I should probably end with a confession. I use AI art in my own projects.

When I wrote my D&D adventure The Lost Citadel, a project I’m genuinely proud of, I used AI-generated artwork for one very simple reason. I couldn’t afford to hire an artist, or perhaps more accurately, I didn’t want to afford hiring an artist. It was a hobby project, I did it for fun, not as a business venture.

That doesn’t suddenly make the artwork great.

If anything, I fully accept that the book is artistically less than it could have been. The illustrations do their job, but they don’t define the identity of the book the way a human artist could have. They lack personality, style and, for want of a better word, soul.

And if someone looked at The Lost Citadel, decided it was AI slop and chose not to buy it, I wouldn’t hold it against them for a second.

I understand the position because I understand the compromise I made.

As a reviewer, however, I don’t think the answer is to draw a line so extreme that any game containing AI artwork is immediately dismissed as worthless.

A board game is more than its illustrations.

It is mechanics, design, theme, writing, balance, playtesting, production and countless hours of work by real people who may have chosen AI art for reasons ranging from budget constraints to simple practicality. Just as I don’t want my own work dismissed solely because I couldn’t afford an illustrator, I’m not going to do that to someone else.

But I also think there should be a clear acknowledgement that AI artwork is not something I value as an artistic contribution.

So this is the new policy at GamersDungeon.

Any game that uses AI-generated artwork will receive a maximum of 1 star in the Theme category of my reviews.

That doesn’t mean the game is bad. It doesn’t mean I won’t recommend it. It doesn’t mean the designers are lazy or unethical.

It simply means that, in my view, AI-generated artwork does not meaningfully contribute to the artistic identity of a board game and therefore cannot receive a higher score in a category where artistic presentation is a major consideration.

Everything else will still be judged on its own merits. Great mechanics will still be great mechanics. Brilliant design will still be brilliant design. An exceptional game can still receive an exceptional overall score.

In fact, Kingdom Legacy: Exploration managed a respectable 3.15 out of 5 despite receiving only 1 star for Theme.

So this isn’t a boycott. It’s a statement of values.

If you choose AI artwork instead of human artistry, I’m not going to refuse to review your game, and I’m not going to pretend the rest of your work doesn’t matter.

Gamersdungeon.net rating system will be updated with the new AI based rule put into effect. For me, this is a compromise and the most appropriate way to handle AI. It may change in the future, but for now I feel like it’s good middle ground I can work with.

I’m simply going to score the art exactly as I see it. The absence of effort, the equivillant of copy/pasting it from some other source, a non-contributor.

And from this day forward, that’s how AI-generated artwork will be handled on GamersDungeon.net.

And that’s all, folks!

Board Game Reviews, Boardgame Review, Collectable Card Game

Review: Kingdom Legacy: Exploration Expansion

When I reviewed Kingdom Legacy back in March, it walked away with a respectable 3 out of 5 stars. That’s probably worth explaining because, unlike much of the internet, I don’t believe anything short of perfection deserves to be launched into the sun. A three-star score is a very solid game in my book and absolutely worth playing. Anything above two stars is worth consideration.

That said, Kingdom Legacy wasn’t flawless from the standpoint of objective review. It had a few rough edges, and typically, I would say this is exactly why expansions exist. They’re often a second chance, the patch note in physical form, the opportunity to take a good game and turn it into a great one.

Kingdom Legacy, however, is a unique beast; the exploration expansion, like the many expansions that proceeded are not intended to fix balance or adapt playstyle, they are in a sense, a way to continue your legacy experience as you build up your own personal little world. It’s a bit more like a sequel or director’s cut with extra scenes for something you already love. This expansion isn’t trying to fix anything, for better or worse.

Unlike many of the other expansions for Kingdom Legacy, Exploration is not a modest little add-on either. There are almost as many cards here as in the original box, which means there is an awful lot of new content to explore. Yes, the pun is entirely intended, and no, I refuse to apologise for it.

So the question here isn’t whether Kingdom Legacy: Exploration fixes the game; the question is more about how it expands on the already awesome gameplay you know and love.

Overview

Final Score: christmas_star christmas_starchristmas_star( 3.15 out 5) Good Game!

One thing worth pointing out about my rating system is that it’s not necessarily a reflection of how much I like a game. Instead, it is an attempt to score games against a consistent structure that’s intended to be as objective as possible and fair as possible across all game reviews.

If you don’t believe me, consider that Blood Rage is still the only game in GamersDungeon.net history to receive a perfect 5 out of 5 stars, yet it does not even make my personal top twenty games of all time list. Meanwhile, Great Western Trail has sat comfortably on that list for nearly a decade despite earning only 3 out of 5 stars in my review. What I play and what rating a game gets using my rating system are not always going to align. Preference is not the same as judgment.

I consider Blood Rage to be a master class in game design and publishing. It is a perfect game, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it flies to the top of my playlist. I enjoy it, but perfection and preference are not always bedfellows.

Kingdom Legacy falls into exactly that difference and, ultimately, so does Kingdom Legacy: Exploration.

If you asked me over a cup of coffee what I think of Kingdom Legacy, I would tell you it’s one of the most addictive solo card games I have played in years. It has occupied an embarrassing amount of my table time, and this expansion simply gives me even more reasons to keep shuffling cards instead of doing something sensible with my time.

As my wife says when she catches me on the deck shuffling cards, “Are you gonna do that all day?”, The answer is, yes, now fetch me a beer, wench!, I have a kingdom to run! (Note: this joke was approved by the wife; no husbands were injured or killed during the writing of this joke.)

Kingdom Legacy is an exceptionally simple game to learn and an addictive game to play that is just perfect as a solo experience. It has a ton of nuanced decisions that will have you asking the question, what if I… quite a bit.

In fact, this happens often enough that I am seriously considering adding a personal score to future reviews just to separate objective analysis and my personal preferences.

Kingdom Legacy: Exploration does quite a bit to change the overall rating of the original game, not so much because the latest edition of the game (2nd edition) changes anything, but my entire reflection on what this game is and how it is played was vastly altered by adding an expansion to it. Not that it changed how you play, but more like it opened a new avenue of understanding just what this game is about and what about it makes it so brilliant while also simultaneously exposing some of its flaws as a product.

In Exploration, you will find lots of cards that play off each other, but you won’t get them all in play, so there are some tough choices to make that you will have to ponder, but as was the case in the base game, it’s not always 100% clear how these will impact you in later stages of the game. That is the fun part with this system: you do stuff to see what happens.

If you already enjoy Kingdom Legacy and your first thought after finishing a campaign was “I wish there was more of this,” then congratulations, your wish has been granted ten times over. This expansion adds more cards, more scoring opportunities, and more crucial decisions to the expansion of your kingdom than the core game did to this point.

On the other hand, if the base game never clicked for you, Exploration is unlikely to perform some sort of cardboard miracle. It is unapologetically an expansion for existing fans, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. While many expansions try to patch weaknesses or inject additional or new systems to attract new players, Exploration instead looks at Kingdom Legacy, nods approvingly, and says, “Here, have more.”

All of the new content focuses on the later stages of the game, where your kingdom is already sprawling, but like the core game, every decision has layers of consequences attached to it. Just like the base game, you will only see a fraction of the available cards in any single campaign, meaning it will take many plays before everything reveals itself. In a way, that is a flaw with Kingdom Legacy as a product, as it is a legacy game designed to be played once.

Thankfully, the designers anticipated that. Unlike the core box, Kingdom Legacy: Exploration is designed to be played twice, meaning two base game campaigns (two kingdoms) can make full use of a single expansion.

And, as has become almost standard practice with this legacy game, sleeving the cards allows you to preserve and reset the experience if you prefer your kingdoms recyclable rather than disposable.

So what new treasures does Exploration offer? Well, if you’re a fan of this game, you’re in for a treat!

Components

Score: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star
Tilt: christmas_starchristmas_star

Pros: Good card quality cards with great documentation and online support for the game.

Cons: No major flaws, but there is nothing awe-inspiring; it’s just good.

Component quality in Kingdom Legacy: Exploration is identical to that of the core game, which is to say, quite good.

There is admittedly not a great deal to discuss here because, at the end of the day, it’s still a box full of cards. Thankfully, they are good quality cards with a nice finish and perfectly in line with what you would expect from a modern collectible card game. They shuffle well, hold up to repeated play, and serve that aesthetic and addictive process of card handling we all love perfectly.

The instructions for integrating the expansion into the base game are clear and straightforward, avoiding the all too common expansion tradition of making you search three rulebooks and a forum post from 2022 just to figure out where one deck is supposed to go.

It also benefits from the same excellent online support as the core game, making setup and rule questions easy to resolve.

Most importantly, the expansion feels completely consistent with the original release. Nothing about the presentation feels rushed or tacked on. It looks, feels, and plays like it was always intended to be part of the Kingdom Legacy experience, and for that reason, it earns exactly the same score as the core game, which is to say there is nothing particularly awe-inspiring; it’s just good.

Theme

Score: christmas_starchristmas_star
Tilt: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star

Pros: Mechanics and theme connect to create an addictive engine-building game with personality.

Cons:  The use of AI images absolutetly kills this game’s spirit, it makes it feel generic and uninspired with many poorly curated images.  It’s all rather soulless.

The central theme of Kingdom Legacy: Exploration is exactly what the title promises. Exploration opens up vast new lands to discover, unique buildings to construct, interesting people to recruit, and specialised equipment to uncover. All of this greatly expands the number of scoring opportunities available while also giving the impression that your kingdom has matured and is entering a much more robust level of growth. It’s all thematically well-connected.

In terms of expansions, there is no official order in which expansions for Kingdom Legacy are to be played, but to me, it felt quite right to have exploration be the first; it just feels like a natural fit.

Mechanically, I would not say the expansion dramatically changes the experience. It’s very much just more of the Kingdom Legacy you already like, which is exactly what fans are looking for. There are a handful of new events and scoring opportunities that are genuinely clever and produce the same little moments of surprise and satisfaction that made the base game so addictive. Nothing here fundamentally changes my opinion of the theme, but there are plenty of memorable moments that will leave you smiling just the same, and that is all I can say about that without spoilers.

Unfortunately, there is one grim topic that still hangs over Kingdom Legacy like an unwanted random event card, and it is more relevant now than when this game was first released.

Neither the second edition nor the Exploration expansion addresses the game’s reliance on AI-generated artwork; in fact, it leans fully into it as if this is not a major controversy in the board gaming world, a major miscalculation on the part of the publisher. The visual style remains inconsistent, with AI images that often look poorly curated and disconnected from one another.

This is a very common opinion about the use of AI images in board games. I would recommend that anyone publishing a board game in the future avoid AI art like the plague; whatever the benefit is, it’s not worth the backlash. AI art used to be disliked; at this point, using it makes you a pariah.

My position on the use of AI in board games hasn’t changed, which is to say, I don’t really care that much about it for hobby projects and small struggling publishers trying to get their game out, but I recognise that it’s an obvious shortcut, and it typically quite dramatically reduces the quality of a game. This is very true for Kingdom Legacy; it’s a considerably lesser game because of the use of AI images.

When I reviewed the original Kingdom Legacy release, I was willing to overlook AI in the rating because Kingdom Legacy was clearly a passion project from a small team experimenting with a new idea, and I was happy to give it the benefit of the doubt that this shortcut was taken out of necessity.

That argument and the leeway given are no longer appropriate. Kingdom Legacy has found an audience. It received a second edition. It has successfully launched many expansions. It is no longer an unknown experiment but an established product from a successful and prominent publisher with a proven record of success.

Simply put, any excuse given by an established publisher about why they use AI Images rather than hiring a real artist simply does not fly and should be vigorously opposed.

I think board game fans are justified in not supporting AI-generated games, as it damages the hobby as a whole. The more people that do this, the more it will normalise, and the less distinct and unique games will become. As hobbyists, we should fight against, speak out against, and reject AI art in our games, especially from established publishers who should know better and have the means to do better.

Gameplay

Score: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star
Tilt: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star

Pros: It has that addictive, just one more turn presence, lots of cool surprises for existing fans.

Cons: The legacy component of this game is out of place; it’s more a nuisance than a feature.

Writing a gameplay review for a legacy game is a strange challenge because the entire point is that I am not supposed to tell you what happens. It’s a bit like reviewing a detective novel by saying, “The ending is great, trust me,” and hoping everyone simply accepts that.

So I am going to dance around the spoilers as gracefully as I can.

Kingdom Legacy: Exploration focuses, like all of the Kingdom Legacy expansions, on the late stages of your campaign. The core game is all about building your tiny kingdom from a few acres of land. The expansions are where you get to take that creation out for a victory lap and see what else it can become.

I think that is one of Kingdom Legacy’s greatest strengths. That feeling of civilisation building.

By the time you reach Exploration, you’ve already made dozens of unique decisions that shaped your kingdom. You have watched opportunities come and go, suffered through disasters, stumbled into unexpected successes and built something that somehow feels distinctly yours. It’s just a deck of cards, yet it develops a surprising amount of personality.

That is also why Kingdom Legacy is so addictive.

The attachment is not really to the mechanics but to the story that emerges from your choices and micro experiences that feel great in solitude. You want to see what happens next, even if what happens next is another tax collector demanding resources you no longer have.

Exploration gives you exactly that. It hands you another toy box filled with new lands, new scoring opportunities and new cards to weave into your existing kingdom. It’s undeniably fun, and there is plenty to discover.

At the same time, I never felt that the expansion fundamentally refreshed the experience in some meaningful way. Unlike most expansions to games, there wasn’t this “oh wow, ok that changes everything” moment. It was basically the same game with new cards.

By the time your kingdom is fully developed, when you complete the base set, those additional rounds in the expansion feel more like extending a great evening than starting a brand new adventure. I enjoyed every minute of it, but there is an unavoidable sense that you are still playing with the same systems and the same ideas.

The best comparison I can think of is playing Magic: The Gathering with your favourite deck after adding a handful of exciting new cards. The deck is better, you have a few new tricks, and you are happy to keep playing it, but part of you is also looking forward to the next expansion that introduces an entirely new set and shakes everything up so that you can build new decks.

There were also a few moments that genuinely caught me off guard.

Without spoiling anything, Exploration hides several clever little surprises that feel almost like easter eggs for dedicated players. Those moments produced exactly the kind of grin that made me keep turning over cards long after I probably should have gone to bed.

The expansion also introduces some additional resources and gameplay elements. Whether these originated here or appeared in other expansions first, I can’t say, but they were new to me. They add some welcome variety and interesting decisions without dramatically changing the flow of the game.

I realise this entire section has been frustratingly vague, but that is the price of reviewing a legacy game without ruining the experience.

So let me keep the gameplay conclusion simple.

If you enjoyed Kingdom Legacie’s mechanics and addictive just one more turn nature, then Exploration is an easy recommendation. There is a huge amount of content packed into the box, plenty of new ways to develop your kingdom, lots of satisfying scoring combinations and a handful of genuinely delightful surprises waiting to be discovered. It never reinvented the game for me, but it absolutely reminded me why I enjoyed it so much in the first place.

Replayability and Longevity

Score: christmas_starchristmas_star
Tilt: christmas_starchristmas_star

 

Pros: The experience of building up your kingdom is dramatically enhanced by a large library of new cards to explore and add to your kingdom

Cons:  It’s too confined and short; you’ll finish this expansion in a single sitting, and then it’s over forever.

Replayability in a legacy game is always a slightly awkward subject because, technically speaking, there is none.

The game is designed to be played once, experienced once and then retired. It is an engine built with a finite amount of fuel; eventually, the tank runs dry.

Kingdom Legacy: Exploration is essentially an extra fuel tank bolted onto the side of the original game. It extends the journey, gives you more places to visit and more things to discover, but eventually you arrive at the same destination.

There is something genuinely satisfying about the finality of that experience. Picking up a kingdom that you thought was finished, dusting it off and giving it one last adventure feels surprisingly nostalgic. Your little collection of cards has history. You remember why that building is there, why that character survived and why you still refuse to forgive that one event card that nearly ruined everything.

The problem is that while the game’s end is satisfying, it’s not a game end where you’re done with the game forever.

One of the most common comments you will see about Kingdom Legacy is that everyone is trying to figure out how to avoid the legacy component. It’s just a bad fit for this game.

That is perhaps the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of Kingdom Legacy.

When you finish, your immediate reaction is not relief or closure. It is the overwhelming urge to shuffle everything up and play again, because that is what we do with games we love. Replayability is, after all, one of the defining reasons this hobby exists.

Thankfully, Kingdom Legacy offers a very easy way to bend the rules. Sleeve the cards, use removable markers and suddenly the entire legacy experience becomes reusable. It is not difficult to do, and it is absolutely the approach I would recommend to anyone buying the game.

However, I have to judge replayability based on the experience the designers intended, not the one clever players can engineer for themselves.

Viewed through that lens, Kingdom Legacy: Exploration is still a one-time journey. It is an excellent journey, a memorable one and a longer one than before, but once you reach the end of the road, there are no official turns left to take.

You can always get another expansion, though, so there is that.

Conclusion

As a system, as a gameplay mechanic and as an overall experience, I think Kingdom Legacy and Kingdom Legacy: Exploration are fantastic. I have absolutely no hesitation recommending them to anyone who enjoys card games and is looking for a satisfying solo experience.

In particular, if you enjoy engine-building games that capture the feeling of growing a tiny settlement into a thriving civilisation, Kingdom Legacy delivers that experience in abundance. Every new card feels like another chapter in the story of your kingdom, and that sense of progression remains one of the most addictive gameplay loops I have encountered in recent years.

That said, I would be remiss if I did not climb onto my soapbox for a couple of minutes.

The first issue is the legacy component itself.

I have never quite shaken the feeling that Kingdom Legacy does not actually want to be a legacy game. It is almost as if someone designed an excellent solo engine builder and then, somewhere late in development, another person walked into the room and declared, “What if we made players throw it away when they finish?”

Nothing about the underlying design really benefits from being disposable, and unlike most legacy games, Kingdom Legacy is too short to give you that sense of finality and closure when you’re done playing.

In fact, I would argue the opposite. Once you understand the systems and discover the different paths available, the natural instinct is to immediately start another campaign and try something completely different. The game is packed with meaningful choices and interesting combinations that beg to be explored.

That is the mark of a highly replayable game. Yet, by design, replayability is intentionally limited.

Yes, you can sleeve the cards and preserve everything, and I strongly recommend doing exactly that, but I still find the official approach to be an unnecessary restriction on an otherwise brilliant design.

The second issue is the continued use of AI-generated artwork.

I genuinely do not understand why publishers continue to ignore what has become one of the loudest conversations in modern board gaming. Whether you personally love AI art, hate it or fall somewhere in the middle, it is impossible to deny that a majority of the hobby simply does not want it in professionally published games.

Art is one of the cornerstones of board games; it is a thriving place of creativity and imagination, to trade that in for AI slop, which is all you will find in Kingdom Legacy, is a tragedy. This game deserves so much better!

It’s so unfortunate because beneath those visual shortcomings lies one of the most charming solo card games I have played in years. Kingdom Legacy: Exploration expands everything that already works, adds meaningful content and provides several genuinely memorable surprises without losing the addictive engine-building that makes the original so compelling.

FryxGames understands and is perfectly capable of producing great art for their games, as was illustrated in the amazing work done on Fate: Defenders of Grimheim. The use of AI in Kingdom Legacy was a conscious business decision, and FryxGames has been quite open about it, offering its own take and justification for its use. The debate regarding AI in board games is far from settled, though the most likely conclusion is that we will continue to see its use with increasing consistency.

For existing fans the recommendation is incredibly easy.

There is more kingdom here, more discoveries, more clever interactions and more reasons to spend another evening telling yourself, “Just one more turn.”

If, however, you’re protesting this game because it uses AI art, know that I get it; The publisher does as well. In fairness, the official position of the publisher is that it’s too expensive to have that much art in a small, cheap solo card game, and that very well may be the case and logic behind its use. That may even be sufficient justification, a reasonable excuse, but there are plenty of other ways to work around the cost associated with art; people have been printing games without AI art for a very long time. There are other solutions; this is not a new problem.

Board Game Reviews, Boardgame Review, Hidden Gems, On The Table

On The Table: White Castle

White Castle showed up on my Top 10 Favorite Games to Play on BGA list last week, and this little worker placement game has become something of an obsession lately. Today, I want to dig a bit deeper into what makes it such a special and truly unique worker placement game.

At its core, White Castle is a dice-driven worker placement game with a heavy focus on tight resource management and a healthy dose of engine building. In other words, it’s a pretty standard Euro game on paper. Nothing about that description should have veteran board gamers falling out of their chairs.

What’s interesting is that White Castle isn’t really the sort of game that normally lands in my wheelhouse. In fact, if you’ve spent any time reading this blog, or glanced at my Top 20 Games of All Time list, you’ll know that Euro games rarely make the cut. When one does, like Dune Imperium or Terraforming Mars, it’s usually because it has earned its keep at my table as one of the very best in the genre.

Terraforming Mars remains a gold standard for Euro games in my book. Through and through, it’s outstanding in every measurable way, the only complaint I have is I don’t play it as often as I would like to. Rich, deep, meaningful gameplay, it’s a masterpiece.

I realize that makes me sound like a bit of a board gaming snob. I promise that’s not the case. I’m perfectly capable of recognizing and appreciating a great game, Euro or otherwise, regardless of genre. It’s just that Euro games often leave me feeling a little cold. They’re usually clever, well-designed, and about as exciting as a tax spreadsheet.

When a Euro game grabs my attention, that says something. When it completely takes over my BGA play history, that says even more. White Castle has done exactly that. I genuinely believe it’s operating in the same league as the genre’s heavy hitters and deserves to be mentioned alongside some of the greats.

I’m still anxiously awaiting my physical copy, but it’s clear as day that this is a very pretty game, albeit a very busy game. I would definitely put it in the “gamers” game category.

There are two things in particular that stand out.

The first is its brilliant use of dice as communal workers that every player draws from. The second is the game’s razor-sharp efficiency. White Castle wastes absolutely nothing. Every action matters, every resource feels precious, and every turn leaves you wishing you had just one more action to pull off your master plan.

It’s a master class in game design.

The Dice Workers

Most worker placement games follow a pretty familiar formula. You have your own pool of workers, your opponents have theirs, and everyone competes for action spaces on the board. That’s the core of the mechanic and, in many games, that’s about where the story ends.

The more interesting examples tend to add something extra. Age of Empires gives players different worker types that create unique opportunities and decisions. Dune Imperium layers deck building and combat on top of its worker placement system, giving players multiple ways to approach the game and interact with one another.

That’s generally where I land on worker placement games. When the mechanic exists in isolation, I often find it a little dry. It’s not that games like Russian Railroads are bad. Far from it. They’re well-designed games with plenty of strategic depth. The problem, at least for me, is that the interaction between players often begins and ends with, “Well, you took the spot I wanted.”

I know that this is a worker placement fan favorite, but it did not fare well for me. It’s a game about railroads, yet they are barely featured in the game, and it’s just a plain, run-of-the-mill worker placement game with absolutetly nothing particularly interesting happening beyond that. It was, in a word, kind of boring.

As a result, many worker placement games start to feel a little one-dimensional over time. The better ones usually find a way to add some extra flavor, some additional layer that transforms the mechanic into something more engaging.

That’s where White Castle surprised me.

At its heart, it’s still a worker placement game. It hasn’t abandoned the formula. Instead, it takes the worker placement mechanic itself and twists it into something far more interesting through its use of communal dice.

The first thing that stands out is that the dice are shared by everyone. Just like the action spaces, the workers themselves are a limited resource. Suddenly, you’re not only competing for the spaces you want to use, but you’re also competing for the workers you want to use on them.

There are a lot of dynamics in White Castle, from the cards that make up the worker placement spots to the value of the dice, no two games are going to be the same, and there is no “base strategy” that is going to work. You really have to assess what is feasible and work with what’s on the table. It’s a new puzzle every time you play.

That alone would be clever, but White Castle goes several steps further.

Each die has three different characteristics that matter.

The first is its value. Depending on where you’re placing it, a high-value die might earn you resources (coins) while a low-value die could cost you precious coins. Sometimes the die you desperately want is also the die you can least afford.

The second is its color. Different locations on the board require different colored dice to activate, which means you’re not simply evaluating numbers. You’re evaluating colors, values, timing, resources, combos, and opportunity all at once.

Then there’s the position of the die on the bridge.

Dice on the right side generally have higher values, making them immediately attractive. Dice on the left, however, grant a secondary action that becomes increasingly valuable as the game progresses. The catch is that taking a die shifts the remaining dice along the bridge. Grab the wrong die, and you might accidentally serve up an incredible opportunity to the next player.

And that’s where White Castle starts to become fascinating.

Every decision feels loaded with consequences, for a worker placement, the interaction goes far beyond “you took my spot”.

Most mechanics are communal in White Castle, but each player does have their own player board where some of your engine-building elements are managed, including some elite spot you might, on occasion, be able to leverage.

Do you take the lower value die on the left to gain the bonus action? Can you afford the resource cost? Are you opening the door for another player to grab exactly what they need? Is there a chain of actions on the board that turns an average move into a great one?

These aren’t decisions you make once or twice during a game. They’re decisions you make every single turn.

What’s remarkable is how much depth emerges from such a simple idea. On paper, you’re just selecting a die and placing it on the board. In practice, every choice feels like a small puzzle packed with tradeoffs, risks, and opportunities.

It’s one of the most elegant worker placement systems I’ve seen in years.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this approach ends up influencing future designs. The idea of communal workers with multiple competing characteristics feels like a genuine step forward for the genre. White Castle takes one of board gaming’s oldest and most familiar mechanisms and somehow makes it feel fresh again.

I was trying to think of a game that White Castle might be compared to, and while it’s a bit of a stretch, it does remind me a little bit of The Red Cathedral.

It’s simply one of the most elegant and exciting worker placement mechanics I have seen come along in a board game in a long time, and I definitely think it’s going to become a thing. You are going to see this in a lot of worker placement games in the future. This is the next evolution of worker placement games.

Now, I should say that I don’t know that this mechanic originated in White Castle; there are tens of thousands of board games out there, so I don’t want to accidentally steal credit from someone by suggesting this is the first invention of its kind, odds are it probably isn’t. Suffice it to say, it’s the first time I have seen it in a game, and I think it’s fantastic.

The Efficiency

The other thing that makes White Castle stand out is just how unbelievably efficient the design is.

This game is tight. Not “Euro game tight.” Not “carefully balanced tight.” I’m talking about the kind of tight where every game feels like you’re attempting a speed run and constantly realizing you’re three moves away from greatness.

Most of the time, you’ll come up short somewhere. You’ll miss a resource, mistime an action, or discover that one seemingly harmless decision three turns ago has come back to haunt you. Then every once in a while, it all clicks together, and the result feels magical.

Without the expansion, you’ll take just nine actions during the entire game. Nine. That’s your whole game.

Nine opportunities to create the most efficient sequence of actions possible and somehow turn a handful of resources, workers, and bonuses into a winning score.

Despite having only 9 actions in a game, your first few play-throughs are going to feel very slow. There are a lot of interactive decisions; the depth here is pretty heavy. Once you get accustomed to the rhythm, though, this game can actually be quite fast. Analysis Paralysis however, is real in this game; people are going to get stuck.

At first, that sounds restrictive. In fact, during your first few games, it feels almost cruel. Some might bounce off the game for that reason, but stick with it because this game is so much more than what you discover on the surface. Surely nine actions can’t possibly be enough. And somehow they are.

What makes White Castle special is how many possibilities exist inside those nine actions. Every move has the potential to trigger another action, generate resources, set up future turns, or create scoring opportunities. The game constantly asks you to squeeze one more drop of value out of every decision.

It’s difficult to fully explain until you’ve experienced it yourself. White Castle is one of those rare games where you finish a session and immediately start replaying your turns in your head. Not because the game was frustrating, but because you can see the path so clearly in the aftermath. You can see where two or three tiny improvements would have transformed a good score into a great one.

That’s the mark of exceptional design.

Great game design isn’t just about knowing what to include. It’s also about knowing what to leave out. White Castle feels like a game that has been refined over and over again until every unnecessary piece was stripped away.

What’s left is a remarkably focused experience where every mechanism serves a purpose and every action matters.

It’s a design that’s elegant, balanced, and incredibly satisfying to explore.

Quite frankly, it’s a chef’s kiss.

Conclusion

I’ll be reviewing White Castle in the near future, but even before putting together a full review, I can already say this much with confidence.

This game is special.

In nearly twelve years of writing for Gamers Dungeon, very few games have seriously threatened a perfect 5 out of 5 score. In fact, only one game has ever achieved it: Blood Rage.

White Castle might just be the second. That’s not a statement I make lightly.

White Castle offers an expansion that is available on BGA called White Castle Matcha, and honestly, once you know the game and try this expansion, it will be hard to imagine playing without it. It’s one of those rare cases where it feels like this expansion probably should have been included in the base game. I didn’t think so at first, probably because I tried it too early, but it’s made me a believer!

If you’re a fan of Euro games, this should already be on your radar. If you’re a fan of worker placement games, it absolutely needs to be. White Castle takes a familiar genre and manages to make it feel fresh, challenging, and exciting again.

That’s a rare achievement.

This is one of the best worker placement games I’ve played in years.

And that’s not praise I hand out very often.