Kingsport Festival Board Game

Loved it! I feel this is better than Kingsburg with expansion as just a base game. The multiple combination of events and festivals will keep it fresh for many play throughs. Artwork and flavor text on the elder gods are amazing.

Kingsport Festival may look like some kind of HP Lovecraft-themed horror game, but it is actually something quite different. Instead you have dice rolling for turn order and then dice rolling for actions. When you open the box and see the wooden markers, you realize that this is more of a euro than another Arkham Horror-styled game. This is actually a clever move, as player view for victory points, while maintaining their sanity, magic points, spells and resources in order to score more points, expand into locations and survive the raids that come from investigators. The combat occurs about 4 times per game and is far more abstracted than you might think. Instead, the investigator has a strength value and each player has a value. This value starts at one and increases based on locations you have influence at, or spells that you might have acquired. If your value is higher than the investigator you win the battle and gain some type of reward. Lose and you may lose a resource or two, possible a location you hold or even your sanity points. The game features a standard mode and then a number of different scenarios, each named after a Lovecraft story. In turn the scenarios may instruct you to take a random festival card which stays face down from all players until the end of the game. This festival card can vastly alter the scoring of the game and can make for some exciting finishes. The important thing is that with the numerous scenarios, chosen at random, plus the random festivals, there should be plenty of variability between games. This is a fun, light to medium title that my gaming group and I enjoyed playing.

Kingsport Festival is a 2-5 player dice rolling worker placement game that is played for a total of 12 rounds. The player that ends the twelfth round with the most Cult points is the winner. The theme is each player is a cult that is trying to worship a Lovercraftian monster and bring about destruction by their cult. The crux of the game is trying to collect enough resources to spread influence across the city to obtain these cult points. At the start of every round the players will roll simultaneously and the player order goes from lowest roll to highest. All around the board will lay 20 H.P. Lovercraft monsters that are numbered from zero to twenty. On a players turn they have the choices of placing their dice individually, or combine them, on the matching numbers of the creature that they wish to activate, "Invoke." Players will have to be strategic as once a die, or dice, are placed on a creature--no other player may go there. After all players have placed their dice on the creatures, starting with the lowest monster and going up the twentieth, the players will receive their awards for going to these Lovecraftian monsters. These awards are gathering resources that are destruction, red cubes, death, black cubes, and evil, purple cubes. The rest are obtaining sanity, sanity is a resource used to activate some Lovecraftian monsters. The last important awards are spells and magic. Spells help invoke higher dice rolls, evil cards, additional victory points, destruction cards, and strength buffs, death cards. Magic is used to pay for these spells. This phase is rather quick as either the players will only have one choice or two. The end of this round has players now spreading influence from the center of the board. This influence is displayed by placing a disc in that players color on city spaces. The first city is free for all players, but to travel to an adjacent city the players will need to spend the resources they have acquired. Going to different cities will give the player victory points and special abilities that will augment an aspect of the game for them. When this is over players will proceed to the next round and roll dice again. This changes if a raid is required to happen which is randomly distributed across the twelve rounds by the Scenario card chosen. A raid will happen four times in the game and be accompanied by an event card. The event card transpires first as it can help or hinder the players, an example would be to give or take away resources. The raid itself is an investigator that is attacking all the players in the game. The strength of the investigator changes for each raid, but players are given an idea to the possible strength they will face like one to three. If players eliminate the investigator they receive an reward and losing will grant them a penalty. After twelve rounds the players will see who is in the lead and that player will win the game. This changes if players are playing with a festival card. A festival card is brought into play by certain scenario cards in the game. These festival cards give the players an additional means to score cult points at the end of the game. Overall Kingsport Festival is a good dice rolling worker placement. The only thing that really affects it is that board is always the same. The abilities each town provides never changes or are replaced with any other abilities. The rest of the game has some modular mechanics like the investigators being randomly chosen for each of the four raids. The scenarios chosen in the game can change how a particular monster works or location. Adding to this, the festival cards can give a nice change in how cult points are tallied at the end, but the locations being the same hurts it. The majority of the game relies on players spreading their influence to earn victory points. Aside from players having to change their plan when placing dice, they will usually play the same when it comes to expanding in the city. It is a good game for beginning players as everything is straightforward and even has a clear explanation of what each Lovecraftian monster does on the back of each of their cards. Anyone wanting anything heavier or a medium weight game will find some amusement, but will hardly be their go to game. It is a good game for a low price and sometimes playing something lite with friends can be really good.

This game is incredible! It makes it to the table frequently and is loved by essentially everyone who plays it. If you are a fan of resource management games, I could not recommend this enough. It is worth noting, though, that the art in this game is extremely dark. If you find that unappealing, this game will likely be significantly less enjoyable for you.

Good game with fairly clear instructions, it appears more complex than it actually is. Oh and the pictures of Cthulu and his fellow Old Gods are perfect nightmare fuel!

Very well made game with many pieces. Read it carefully as it has several steps in turn. Moves fairly quick.

This is a very fun game. I purchased a new game here on amazon. When I opened the box to play it, we found that one of the elder god cards was missing. I have tried to contact passport games to get a replacement card. It has been a week with no response from the company. Like I said it is a very fun game. But the missing card is a real bummer for the experience.

Awesome game. I think it's better than the game it re-implements (Kingsburg).