Base price: $40.
3 – 5 players.
Play time: 30 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of For a Crown was provided by Asmodee US.
Editor’s note: My friend had Bridgerton on in the background, so if the prose here is a bit pompous, blame her, not me.
Long week, but we’re back to it! I usually like to start my reviews before it’s time to post them, but I’m not always so lucky in that regard. Plus, it’s my birthday next week and that’s taking up some mental bandwidth (and it’s American Tabletop Awards season soon!). For a short month, February has a lot of board game stuff happening. But you might be less interested in that than the game itself. One of the first 2025 releases I’m covering, let’s check out For a Crown!
In For A Crown, players are different animals finally uniting their realms under one banner. Obviously, it should be yours, but inexplicably, the other animals have their own designs on ruling. How silly of them. After much negotiation, you all agree that the richest person should rule the land, kind of like how the American government works right now, for some reason. Love that for us. Not to be outdone, you’ll have to use your wits, your subterfuge, and a few of your mercenaries to tilt the scales in your favor. Will you end up leading the realm?
Contents
Setup
Setup isn’t too complicated. Each player has a set of tokens and such that you should put in their personal box:
That should be a portrait, an heirloom, ten rubies, and some card sleeves. They’ll all come in handy later.
Start a shared deck by placing the two Event Cards with a star on them in a pile, setting the other cards aside for now.
Set out the board, placing the 1 / 3 / 5 money tokens in the first three spaces and the other tokens to the side:
Shuffle the various stacks of cards (the backs should make a panorama, if that helps) and make a row above the board. Then, flip two cards down below each card in the row to make the card market.
The coins and rubies and Masked Bandits go in their own container; place that in the center.
You’re just about ready to start! Shuffle up the player portraits and place them in a random order on the bottom of the market board. That will determine the player order. The rightmost player gets 3 coins, the leftmost player gets 5 coins, and all other players get 4 coins. You should be good to go!
Gameplay
For A Crown is an interesting deckbuilding-style game. Your goal is to earn the most, but you’re not building your own deck! You’re instead contributing to a shared deck where every card will be played during a round. Earn and lose money, rubies, and Masked Bandit tokens to take control of the realm!
Each round has a few phases. The first phase is always Recruiting. To Recruit a Mercenary, pay the cost below their column, place their card in one of your sleeves, and then place the now-sleeved card on top of the shared deck. Do not refill the Mercenaries until all players have Recruited! Also, during the first round, you’ll do this twice. If you don’t have enough coins to Recruit your preferred Mercenary, you can use Rubies instead of coins to pay costs (though I wouldn’t recommend making a habit of it).
Next, the Reveal Phase! Shuffle the Shared Deck and play all the cards, one at a time. If a Mercenary appears, the player who hired them gains the benefit. If an Event Card appears, all players gain the benefit or penalty.
Sometimes, you’ve lost all your Rubies. That’s tough. If that happens, you can sell your precious, one-of-a-kind, priceless family Heirloom for ten Rubies. Surprisingly less priceless than expected. However, if you run out of Rubies again, you lose. Your Mercenary Cards are also ignored for the rest of the game if that happens. They’re not going to work for a pauper. If this happens to anyone, finish the round, and then end the game. Player elimination is no fun.
Once the Reveal step is complete, it’s time to prep for the next round! Put all the revealed cards back into a shared deck, face-down, and add a new Event, face-down, to the top of the deck. Then, slide a 0 Recruitment Cost token into the board, pushing the cost tokens to the right. This will make one column cheaper and, usually, one column purchasable.
After four rounds, the game ends! There are a few end-of-game bonuses (a la Mario Party):
- The player with the most coins gains 1 Ruby.
- The player with the most influence (their portrait is the farthest to the right) gains 1 Ruby.
- The player with the most Masked Bandit Tokens loses 1 Ruby.
The player with the most Rubies wins! Remember that your Heirloom counts as 10 Rubies.
Player Count Differences
For a Crown is a bit of a mixed bag as player count increases. In an ideal game, this gives you more players to target with various moves and such. In a less-ideal game, this means that more players can decide to dogpile one player. The latter case isn’t that fun, as it can preemptively end the game and also isn’t really sustainable to play against. You can’t really strategize harder; you just only have so many cards that do things. It depends a bit on your group. Personally, I think it’s fun to play with more people just because so much more is happening, round-to-round, but that dogpiling outcome makes me wary about playing it with people who are liable to behave that way. Up and beyond that, however, I’d still lean toward more players than fewer.
Strategy
- Money loses some of its utility as the game goes on, but it’s worth having. It’s useful at the beginning to recruit higher-value Mercenaries, and it’s a bit useful at the end for that single extra ruby, but in the middle its main utility is for spending for certain Event Cards.
- If you’re already in the lead for influence, your best bet might be making large gaps between the other players so it’s difficult for a player to maneuver upwards. When you move a portrait around, you move it over any other portraits to the next available spots. So one strategy is to make a bunch of holes and gaps between various portraits so that when someone else moves (or moves you) they can’t necessarily gain the benefit of hopping over another player. Devious, but useful.
- Try not to make too many enemies. The more you annoy other players, the more likely it is they’ll all team up on you. You really don’t want to draw every player’s eye; that leads to ruin.
- Giving Masked Bandits is rude, but trying to set players to have an equal number of them means they’ll be penalized equally, which is even ruder. Usually, the event that requires players to lose rubies for their Masked Bandit tokens hits the player(s) with the most Masked Bandit tokens, so having a tie among the players with the most means that they all get hit.
- I just like rolling the die, so it’s fun to get cards that let you roll it. Is this strategic advice? No. Will it help you have more fun? Probably. Generally speaking, the dice outcomes are all pretty good, so being able to roll it is almost always a good idea.
- The higher-cost cards, well, there’s a bit of a value trade-off. Are they worth spending all that money when they’ll only activate once or twice? This is a bit tricky, since the more valuable cards have pretty good effects, but if they activate at the wrong time you may feel like you’ve wasted your hard-earned money for no reason. I still think it’s generally worth buying some of the high-value cards, but check the cards themselves to be sure.
- You can try to suss out who has the most rubies, but it’s often imprecise and definitely unreliable. My friend had us shake our boxes once and that was clearly wrong. You can try counting who is placing what in their boxes, but again, that’s highly impractical. Just be careful with jumping to conclusions!
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Animals in goofy period outfits never fails to make me laugh. It’s always funny. Granted, watching Bridgerton at the moment, so people in extremely fancy period outfits also makes me laugh too, but seeing animals in complex outfits is a gift.
- The components and storage are pretty nice! I was impressed with all the storage options, to be fair, and it’s very nice to have a bunch of player storage option for players’ various things.
- The shared deck is quirky and fun. I like it as a concept quite a bit! It helps if you have a player enthusiastically announcing the cards as they come out, but honestly, that’s kind of the case for most things. Laying it all out is fun, too. You can go kind of rapid fire and splay out all the cards.
- Selling off your family heirloom sucks, but it’s also a little silly. It’s really just you selling off the family jewels because you have absolutely nothing left, and you have to announce it. Just very much a “alas, I have become … poor”. It’s a little funny, just given the overwhelming context of the game.
- The general art style of the game is quite nice! I really love how vibrant and colorful everything is. It does a nice job of making the Masked Bandits seem menacing and the rubies seem alluring and the Scandal card seem … scandalous.
- I really appreciate that the game came with extra card sleeves, especially since they have fancy patterns and all that. I also tend to break card sleeves eventually, which is a whole problem, so rather than forcing players to send for more at some point, it’s much easier to just include a bunch of extras. I appreciate it.
Mehs
- Shuffling a small amount of sleeved cards is never extremely fun. It’s an ongoing issue, but thankfully, with more cards, the problem starts to go away. Just remember to shuffle from the side, not from the top, lest you mess up the cards.
Cons
- I would like if there were a bit more complexity to the game. I think I want there to be branching paths or more player engagement or something to make the choices more complex and interesting. They’re not bad, as is, but it’s a very light strategy game. It leaves me wanting a bit more.
Overall: 7.25 / 10
Overall, I think For A Crown is a cute little game! It seems to lend itself nicely to the idea of an introductory deckbuilder, though the shared deck is an interesting conceit! If I were going to get particularly technical about terminology, I’m not entirely sure I’d call this a deckbuilder, and that’s half the fun! It’s more of building up a queue of events and trying to hope that the cards you play are activated in an order beneficial to you. This is pretty cool, as a concept, though it does seem like you could expand this out in increasingly interesting ways if you wanted to add more complexity. Even a few more rounds would be fun, like the Mechanica game from Resonym from a few years back. Sometimes you just want the game to persist a bit longer. But I can see where this gets interesting. A few more symbols, a little more to manage, and I could see the strategic elements getting highlighted even further. As it currently stands, though, For a Crown is positioned very nicely as a light strategy game that’s fun and teaches those basic deckbuilding concepts. Plus, it’s got animals in goofy hats, which is largely the dream. If those hats compel you, you want to teach some deckbuilding concepts, or you just like a largely raccoon-driven punishment economy, I’d recommend trying out For A Crown! It’s fun.
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