The Kingdomino Board Game (by Coiledspring Games), as the name suggests, is a domino-style tile placement game for 2-4 players aged 8+.
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Using the domino-style game tiles, players (Kings) set out to expand their kingdom by exploring and collecting new lands: lakes, wheatfields, mountains, forests, meadows and swamps. Careful thought and consideration should to be given to how you collect and place your land tiles as the more interconnecting ‘same’ terrain tiles you have the more points you earn!
Page Contents
Whats In The Box
The Kingdomino box is small and neat, made with strong thick cards and completely covered with lovely printed illustrations. The back of the box also shows what comes inside.
Inside the Kingdomino box you’ll find
- 8 playing pieces (wooden kings – 2 of each colour)
- 4 starting tiles
- 4x3d castles
- 48 domino land tiles
- plastic insert to help store all the pieces neatly in place
- detailed rule book
All the playing pieces are well made. The wooden kings have good paint jobs and there were no rough textures, wood cracks, chips, or pitting. A minimal amount of wood grain could be seen on the front and back face of the pieces. The rest of the pieces are made from really thick card, which makes them easy, and nice to hold and place and they are covered in gorgeous quality, glossy illustrations.
The domino land tiles have numbers on one side and land illustrations on the other.
The Rule book is equally lovely to look at and easy to understand. The rules are clear illustrations to expand on the text. And it includes some additional rules to switch up the game.
How To Play Kingdomino
The aim of Kingdomino is to collect and build interlocking land, using a domino system, in a 5×5 grid around your starting tile. It doesn’t matter where your starting tile sits in the grid you just have to make sure it doesn’t extend more than 5 squares in either direction.
To play, each player takes their coloured King, matching start square and 3d castle and places the start square face up in front of them with the castle placed on top.
The tiles are shuffled and either placed in the box or sometimes we make a tall stack on the table. The number of tiles in-play changes depending on the number of players: 2 players = 24 dominoes, 3 players = 36 dominoes, 4 players =48 dominoes.
In this write up I’m assuming 4 kings are in play.
For the first round, players can either choose the order of play or use the king pieces to randomly choose by drawing a playing piece, one at a time, out of a bag, a player’s hand etc. Once the order of play is decided 4 dominoes are drawn and placed in ascending numerical order on the table.
The tiles are turned over and each player takes it, in turn, to choose which land they would like and places their king on the domino. Four more cards are picked and placed in numerical, ascending, order next to the first set. Players take it in turns, to move their king to their next chosen land tile based on who is at the top of the previous domino set. Once they move their king over, they then place the domino piece they were previously on, into their grid. The game continues with rounds like this until all the dominoes are used up.
How To Place The Dominoes In Your Grid
- Dominoes must either touch the ‘Start Tile’ (classed as a ‘wild tile’ so any terrain can touch it) or connect to a matching terrain tile
- Your grid cannot be more than 5×5 in size
- If you can’t place your tile then it must be discarded
The start tile can be anywhere in your grid, although there are some extra points that can be scored based on where the ‘Start Tile’ is at the end of the game. How you place the tiles on your grid is import. If you’re not careful you may end up with some gaps you can’t fill towards the end of the game or you may end up with some isolated terrain that won’t score you any points!
The first domino tile is always placed next to the ‘start-tile’
How To Score in Kingdomino
Scoring is based on how many touching tiles you have BUT (this is important) you MUST HAVE A CROWN as part of the group. You multiply the number of terrain cards by the number of crowns in that terrain. If you have no crowns it doesn’t matter how much terrain you have you get zero points! It sounds easy but your playing against others who are also after those crowns and terrain tiles.
In the image below, for example, the grid has 5 crowns on the set of 3 mountain tiles which would give 15 points, but one crown on the wheat field set. So they would only get 3 points for that group.
What did we think of kingdomino
We really liked it and it’s a great introduction to strategy games. It’s a lovely visual, tactile game, and the pieces feel nice to handle. Plus the tiles have lots of interesting detail on them that you start to notice the more your play.
The rules are clear and straight forward so once you’ve played it a couple of times the strategic playing starts to kick in. Do you sacrifice being first to pick a tile in the next round so you can get the tile you want or do you scupper another player by taking the tile they’re after! If someone has a lot of matching terrain tiles it doesn’t mean they will win as if they don’t have crowns their score won’t be very big.
It’s also quick to set up, quick to play and quick to pack away. The box says it takes 15 minutes to play but I’d say our average is 30 minutes… a little longer if people are taking their time deciding what to do.
For me it’s one of those classic games that are nice to have in the cupboard. You know exactly what you’re going to get when you get the game out to play, but that doesn’t make it any less rewarding and there’s always some tension towards the end when you start to realise you’re not quite the Kingominator you thought you were!