Monday, January 13, 2025

Very, very early thoughts on 52 Kingdoms

It is human nature to give added weight to something for arbitrary reasons. For example, I try to make the first game I learn in a year one I think will be a good one. For 2025, I taught myself 52 Kingdoms: Adventures.

It is from Postmark Games, a game publisher that I fell in love with last year. And it fits most of the basic parameters of their other games. It only exists as a Print and Play game and doesn't require any construction. Print out a couple of play sheets and you are good. However, instead of using dice as the random element, 52 Kingdoms uses a standard deck of cards.

It is also a dungeon crawl, a genre I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I cut my teeth on Dungeons and Dragons back when dungeons crawls were its basic format. I have played more dungeon crawls than I can remember. On the other hand, I have seen just so many. It's hard for me to get excited by one now.

Each game consists of two sheets of paper. One is of the dungeon map, which honestly bring back memories of old Dungeon magazine, which isn't a bad thing. The other is a choice of two characters to play. You slide the character sheet under the map so you only see one character. The reason I phrase it that way is because there are two maps and two sets of characters... so far. More are yet to come.

I'm not going to go through the rules. Honestly, after I've played a lot more of 52 Kingdoms, I plan on coming back to it and giving a more nuanced review. What I will say is that cards serve as special items, equipment, loot, wounds, monsters, and a randomizer. While far from the most complex dungeon crawl I've ever seen, I do feel like 52 Kingdoms packs a lot into its small space. 

I feel two dangers micro dungeons crawls can fall into are being too simple or too finicky. 52 Kingdoms avoids the latter through graphic design. The play sheets have clear areas for you to place each type of card. There are clear tables for monsters and curses. Good graphic design makes a huge difference between confusion and good game play.

One weakness that 52 Kingdoms has is that, sometimes, the bookkeeping overcomes the theme. I stop feeling like it's about magic and monsters and dungeons and I feel like I'm doing some accounting with a deck of cards rather than a calculator. That said, I think abstraction is inevitable when you're scaling down a concept.

So far, I've found 52 Kingdoms interesting but I haven't really been drawn into it. But here's the thing. I haven't explored even half of the content has been released and I know there will be more maps and characters released. And I am interested to keep on going and see the whole scope of the system.

The potential is there and I feel positive about that.

I also want to note that, when I first saw the name of the game, I was hoping that 52 Kingdoms would have a greater scale than a dungeon. However, its called 52 Kingdoms: Adventures, which gives me hope that this is just the first game in a series that uses this basic system.

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