For The King is a neat boardgame-like role playing game where you move characters around the world, complete quests, fight monsters, improve your gear, conquer dungeons and level up. I was fully on board for most of the game, really enjoying the battle system, the style and the overall progression, but ultimately didn’t like the board game concept of moving slowly on a huge board over a certain period of turns by throwing movement dice around. I’m not sure if there would’ve been a way to do it differently, of course, so your milleage may vary!
The game started a bit rough for me, you make up your party of three characters, all with different stats, skills, and gear. You have no idea what anything does, but you have to parse through all that immediately. It took me a few minutes to fully understand the loop of the game; characters roll movement dice based on one of their stats to know how many squares they can move, you explore around, then it’s the turn of another character. After all your characters have acted, time passes, which might spawn new enemies or events.
A lot is done by “testing” your stats, a mechanic which I thought I understood, but didn’t all the time. Basically, most checks in the game, whether they are done in combat or outside, roll a certain stat and based on how many checks are ‘successes’ something happens. There’s a resource called ‘Focus’ which can be used to turn checks into successes, so that’s really useful. I’m not sure if checks are percentage rolls based on your stats, or if they’re another kind of roll entirely. Puzzles and challenges attempted out of combat have clear outcomes, if you get a certain number of successes, here’s what you get. In combat, things are a bit more nebulous, I’ve had high success rolls miss, low rolls hit, and I’m never sure if enemies roll when they attack or if my own characters are rolling dodge checks. That never detracted me from the fun, but not completely understanding what was going on didn’t feel great sometimes.
You are propelled forward by “Chaos”, and other negative events on the timeline that will creep ever closer to happening, making you move to cleanse chaos shrines, defeat special enemies to remove these events and overall reduce difficulty on your adventures. You visit towns to buy upgrades to your equipment, complete dungeons - that are multiple fights broken up by skill checks and treasure rooms - rent boats, and explore the map. Moving around still feels pretty slow, and when I’ve stopped playing, it was because a really bad event spawning volcanoes on the map was active, and to stop it I would’ve needed to trudge along for like six turns across the map.
The combat itself is really fun! You encounter enemies in groups (or alone if you manage to ambush them) based on their proximity on the board, then it goes using speed to determine turn order. Your weapons define the moves you have and they all have various effects, targets and related checks to do. Characters also have consumable herbs to recover health, focus, and more - and you can upgrade these effects by leveling up your pipe - and it’s really engaging to fight monsters.
Ultimately, For The King is cool, but not exactly what I was looking for. I almost feel like a more streamlined quest to puzzle to fight to dungeon pipeline would’ve been more fun than having to move around slowly, tile by tile, across a huge world, but that’s entirely just me. Give it a shot, maybe you’ll complete the adventure!
