Parents' Guide to Board Kings

What do you get when you mix the engineering of a city building simulator with the competitiveness of a causal board game? The answer is Board Kings, an interesting sort of hybrid that tries its best to combine elements of a few different genres. The result is a hodgepodge of a game that feels a bit like a disjointed jigsaw puzzle. While its entertaining in some aspects, it never quite finds an identity of its own. There's a blatant comparison to be made between Board Kings and the classic board game Monopoly. Players roll dice and move around what begins as an empty board. After landing on a space, players purchase or upgrade buildings, collect money from the citizens of their little board game city, and occasionally play small mini-games to earn extra goodies. Then it's back to another roll of the dice and a repeat of the process until the player eventually has no turns left. The idea is to build a sprawling city and keep the money rolling in.

Where Board Kings departs from the familiar formula is its multiplayer component. Players can occasionally invade other players' carefully crafted world, wrecking their opponents' boards like a rampaging monster, crippling the economy and getting some extra cash in the process. The havoc continues until the player is captured by the patrolling police and sent back home. Of course, this also means that at any given time, others might return the favor and invade the player's home base. The whole thing feels like just a random force of nature that can frustratingly stall any progress. This is made worse later in the game as the price for upgrades and maintenance scales up, pushing players to spend more real-world money to keep the game moving along, or at the very least, to rebuild after a string of invasions. If you can deal with this uncertainty, or want to wreak some havoc, Board Kings could be the game for you, as long as you accept its flaws.