You are a resident of the greatest homestead in the known world, The Kingdom. You and your fellow citizens of this realm live peaceful, happy lives each and every day. The Kingdom recently got comfortable and let its towers down, giving the Time Mage an opportunity to summon all of his might to rip open a rift. It’s time to see the war between the Time Mage and the Kingdom resume, as he brought this biggest forces in to bring havoc to the Kingdom but they are ready this time-their best engineers built Towers that are mobile and summoned some of their best heroes to defend the realm!
Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time is designed by Helana Hope, Sen-Foong Lim and Jessey Wright with graphic design and illustration by Mateusz Komada, Katarzyna Kosobucka, Przemystaw Kasztelaniec. It is published by Lucky Duck Games and plays 1-4 players.
Overview
Kingdom Rush is a co-operative game that allows you and your team to play through campaign level challenges that progressively get harder. You must defend the realm from the Time Mage and win each different scenario that features new challenges, enemies and ways to win.
Gameplay
Each scenarios has a different setup for gameplay that can be found in the scenario book. In general, the hordes start to emerge each round as the enemies come in from edges around the board and move on to the play area. You with your hero and towers must defend the Kingdom and meet the win condition. Let’s look at the six phases of gameplay in general:
Phase 1-Spawn New Hordes: Here players will play out new hordes on the trays and place them on the pathways. This will be a constant flood of enemies that you must contend with through the game. They come out even if there is no space for them, they just spawn into the next available open space. Nothing stops the spawn, even heroes have to move to an adjacent space.
Phase 2-Play Tower and Hero Cards: Players work together to simultaneously play their heroes and tower cards to defeat the enemies on the board. Towers have distinctive areas that they can start from depending on the player count for the game. You may play them directly to those spaces to elicit damage to enemies or you may upgrade a tower to its next level and then pass it to a teammate.
Heroes have specific ways they can activate and defeat enemies as well, and sometimes they may take damage and need a turn off to reset as well. Heroes and Towers together make up your attacks and the way you will take down the enemies.
Phase 3-Destroy Horde Trays: Once you have taken all of your actions you destroy any trays where all enemies are defeated. Trays where heroes landed or soldiers do not move but they do damage those characters. Trays that reach the exit will damage the Kingdom but damaged enemies will help you earn crystals.
Phase 4-Advance Horde Trays: All remaining trays advance, unless they have a soldier or hero on them. Those do not advance and instead damage them. Otherwise these trays start moving down the pathway towards the Kingdom. Each one that reaches the Kingdom will do damage, so be careful with how you let them move!
Phase 5-Pick up Tower and Hero Cards: At the end of the round you return all of your cards to your hand to get ready for the next round.
Phase 6-Spend Crystals: Spend Crystals to purchase new Towers to your hand. These crystals are a shared resource so the cards you buy can got any players.
The game ends when the victory conditions are met which is different for all of the scenarios. Loss conditions however tend to be all about the same-you lose immediately if all of the heart tokens near the exit tile have been removed, as each horde takes one of if they escape to the castle. If a portal card or boss miniature makes it to the Kingdom the game ends immediately as well.
Impressions
My son and I played the bulk of the games of this that I had a chance to try out and we really enjoyed the way they were all different and ramped up in difficulty as we adventured through them. The first one, Rift in Time gives players a great introduction to the basics of the game like how to use and best strategize with the Towers as a team. The heroes are another fun part of this game that add some ways to punch the enemies a but harder than the Towers themselves can do. It was a press your luck mechanics with them with how hard you really pushed them into hordes because having them down and recovering for a round really made things a little more difficult the next round.
The Boss miniatures come in later in the scenarios and make for quite a challenge in the game. Finding ways to damage him and get him off the board really up the difficulty as you fight with the hordes as well. I love these miniatures and think they did a great job on design with these-if I was a painter these would be high on my list to get done for sure!
Kingdom Rush is the first castle defense game that I have played in some time. It is a great port of the mobile game, giving players some of the aspects of the familiar video game they already know. The game gives players a chance to experience the action on the table and with multiple players if you would like. In that way it is something unique to board games, giving us real big box content and experience for a mobile game. Lucky Duck has done that Jetpack Joyride to a smaller scale but this one really stands out as a much more rich and fuller experience on the table.
Back to the tower defense aspect, this format in boardgaming is well-known but honestly not a mechanic I see a lot in popular games as much. Castle Panic was one of the first to really gamify this into the board game world and has been a staple for years. But I think Kingdom Rush really elevates the game style making it one of the best castle defense games I have ever played. The action is non-stop, the enemies just keep piling on and you can’t really catch your breath or prepare between turns-it is a constant barrage of attacks and exactly what this format should feel like.
Overall Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time is exactly what the game promises-a non-stop action game full of hordes of enemies smashing into the Kingdom walls where you and your teammates have to work together to stop them. The co-operative aspects are a blast and everything you would want to have in a game where players work together to defend the realm. Gather up your best team to defend the realm and blast that Time Mage back to where he came in Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time!
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