I’ve said this many a time before, but I reckon that Incredible Dream Studios gave Kevin Wilson the setting of the Kinfire Universe and told him he could make what he wanted, just as long as it helped to build up the continuing narrative of this glorious made up world. So far, freedom has delivered us the glorious feast of Kinfire Chonicles and the tasty lite bites of Kinfire Delve. Where these titles both dealt with cooperation in the adventure setting, Kinfire Chronicles turns your focus back to the city, and like every good adventure, the dreaded down time and paperwork that happen afterwards.
Kinfire Council is all about worker placement and fair to say it is in the same wheelhouse as Lords of Waterdeep, except you’re just the people making sure the adventurers can bugger off and have their amazing quest time. While the Seekers swan about fighting in Chronicles or Delving through Grotto’s, Council is very much making sure that everyone doesn’t succumb to starvation while you play, or end up under the influence of the dangerous Cult. It’s about emptying the bins and making sure the potholes are taken care of.
Kinfire Council is about the needs of a city, and intertwined with that is the task of defending and resolving challenges that The Cult will present to you at the beginning of every turn. The famous Chronicle bag has been repurposed to dish out cult members across your possible 18 worker placement spaces on the board, acting as blockers, and must be arrested to avoided becoming interesting penalties at the end of the round. While those who appear bring with them a challenge that must be overcome during the round by paying in so many precious resources. Your focus in the game is split amongst a few hungry children who exist just to nag and try to grab some attention. You still have a Seeker that can go outside of the city, but along with them you have four ordinary workers that have the potential to be upgraded to different roles to increase their impact when they are played.
Your turn time decisions are based on around fulfilling the cities needs, arresting cult members, building the lighthouse against impending doom, and preventing the cult from unleashing fury. The bureaucrats will demand that you also take a vote on new city laws that can and must be voted in on each round. All of a sudden, those four workers you have available simply don’t seem enough. At times you’ll feel stretched and rightly so, and it is when it is important that you communicate with the other players to makes sure you are all tackling your jobs. Failure to agree can mean that you’re all deciding to build the lighthouse and forgetting that you have left the city to starve. One of your main focuses is to make sure that you aren’t just picking the right spaces to head to, but you are also spending time to upgrade your workers and the various city spots. Failure to do so in the early game can make life difficult for you and the team as demands increase for the city needs, and The Cult serves you challenges to overcome. Ah, the hidden sneaking and pesky Cult.
I’m not sure if the Cult fully works as intended. The challenges work well and add an extra mouth to feed on every round that must be handled to prevent certain doom. I’ll be honest in saying the whole conspiracy based players secretly supporting the Cult plays out as it should. I don’t think its a bad design decision, but it’s an additional pressure situation that isn’t really required considering how the game can progress, and I think I know the way it is meant to work. I’m kind of confused as to why it is needed. The Cult can be easily handled if one of you decides to simply arrest them on sight so they never become more than a first turn annoyance. In later rounds as the needs of the city increase and you find yourself thinking you have to decide between arresting and resources. As the game progresses, with locations being upgraded, there’s never the pressure.
Once the cult becomes a thing, and other players can have the choice to join their ranks and ruins everyone else’s good old time, and you can do nothing about that except consider joining up yourself. At that point, it becomes a race to wreck shop and wreak havoc and race to be the cult member at the top of the greasy pole. There’s no disadvantage for taking this course of action but we then fall into the most dangerous of game types, which is making players feel like they have wasted their time playing for the last two hours that ends up in a rug pull and defeat. There is nothing that will put someone off a game quicker than making them wish they had played something else with their precious time and efforts. I wish the cult was an almost scripted event, that had to happen and then was still something that the entire group had to fight off.
There is the option for the game to be played differently. I don’t know if the addition of The Winds of Change expansion is some kind of recognition that the vanilla Cult is the weakest part of the game, but it offers the chance for you to go full cooperative, without the choice to side with the Cult towards the end of the game, and for me I feel it is going to be the preferred version to play. There’s addition mechanics which change the city going forward, with options to new tokens to pay for resources but at a cost. I feel it will end up in the same situation as Star Wars Rebellion, in that you can play the base game and have a good time, but to unlock the full vision of what was intended, you really need to be playing it with the expansion. I think those players that opt for this route will end up keeping Kinfire Council in their collection for some time. As a cooperative game, it heads down the direction of a Pandemic type game, which isn’t entirely unwelcome to me.
I’m hoping for the politeness of others here. That someone is going to be taking minutes and making sure the coffees are in. It’s not my favourite Kinfire game, which still puts it heads and shoulder above a lot of other games out there. As with other Incredible Dream titles, the production values are something to behold, and for those lucky enough to have the upgraded pieces, Kinfire Council has a wonderful table presence, providing you have a large enough table to play on. The game takes up a reasonable amount of room at larger player counts. There’s a lot of information to look at and so its common to end up asking people to ‘pass the peas’ so they can look at some of the various tiles, deeds, decisions and city spaces. For those looking at a different take on the Lords of Waterdeep formula, I think it is something that should given consideration, providing you’re willing to consider picking up the expansion alongside. At this point, I’ve nothing further to add Mr Chairman, so shall we put it to a vote?
This first impression piece is based on the retail version of the game provided to us by the designer and publisher. We were not paid monetary compensation for this review. We give a general overview of the gameplay and so not all of the mechanical aspects of the game may be mentioned. As with most first impressions, we try to capture how we felt after playing the game a couple of times. The majority of the games that we are play are going to take a reasonable number of sessions and playthroughs to fully understand every possibility that they offer. We hope this write up gives you an idea of whether or not this game is something that you will consider playing or even add to your collection. Even if we don't like something, hopefully it helps you to decide if it is something that you should find out more about. We always suggest you check out a gameplay video to give you a better understanding of the game as it is played. If you would like to support more content on the blog then please consider backing us on Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/werenotwizards
