As members of the Din’Lux council, you must work together to address the city’s needs—but sometimes personal ambitions pull you in other directions.
Kinfire Council is a worker placement game for 2 to 6 players, ages 14 and up, and takes about 90 to 120 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of $60 for a copy of the base game; there’s also a $99 tier that includes the expansion and an upgrade kit with wooden tokens, as well as opportunities to include some other games set in the shared universe of Atios. I think it’s possible to play this with younger kids if they’ve played worker placement games before, as long as they have the patience for a longer game. (My 11-year-old played it with us but had to quit early because it was her bedtime.)
Kinfire Council was designed by Kevin Wilson and published by Incredible Dream Studios, with art direction by Katarzyna Bekus.
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Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, and there were some changes made to the game after the prototype was printed, so some of the exact effects of locations and councilors in my photos won’t be exactly the same as in the finished game. The layout of the city boards has also been rearranged a little to make the numbering a little more intuitive.
Here’s what will come in the game:
The various resource tokens in the base game are cardboard, but the optional upgrade kit will include wooden tokens, a lore book, and neoprene playmats for the worker sheets.
One thing the prototype did not include is the tier system for the board. Din’Lux is built on a hill, and the city board is split into three pieces, which will be placed on top of the plastic storage inserts to raise portions of the city up higher. That seems like a fun effect, but also visually helps to distinguish the locations with an extra cost for your workers. The board itself has an illustration of the city in the background, with double-sided location tiles placed at each spot.
The illustrations in the game are in the same style as those in the other Kinfire games, and I really like this diverse take on fantasy characters, with humans, orcs, elves, dwarves, and so on but with different skin tones and abilities. The worker tokens in the prototype just have letters on them, but the finished game will have character portraits instead, and many of the characters appeared in Kinfire Chronicles so if you’ve played that you may recognize some of them.
You can download a draft of the rulebook here.
The goal of the game is to score the most victory points by the end of 5 rounds. However, if the Cult of Altan has the highest score at the end, the player who has the most influence with the cult will win instead.
Set up the city board by placing all the location tiles on their corresponding spaces, basic side up. Shuffle the research cards and the decree cards and place them in the indicated spaces, as well as the skill tiles. In the City Needs section, place 1 food in each of the top three spaces of the track. Place the various resource tokens nearby.
Set up the threats: shuffle the threat deck and place it and the threat tokens near the threat board. Draw the top 3 cards of the threat deck and set them face-down as a Hidden Threats stack without looking at them. Place the cultist tokens in the bag.
Shuffle the 5 lighthouse sites and place them in a stack next to the lighthouse track, and turn the top site face-up.
Randomly pair the worker sheets with the councilors. Choose a starting player and give them the medallion, and in turn order each player selects one of the sets. Give each player the matching Seeker and worker tokens—the number of workers each player has is based on player count. Everyone starts with 3 coins and 4 influence tokens on their sheet—the remaining influence tokens are set aside in a supply.
The cult starts with 0 points, the first player starts with 1 point, the second player starts with 2 points, and so on.
The game takes place over five “days” and each day has three phases: Sun’s Rise, Day’s Light, and Night’s Fall. Sun’s Rise is when you draw decrees to vote on, and the cultists show up. Day’s Light is the bulk of the game, when players take turns placing their workers. Night’s Fall is when you check the status of the lighthouse and the city’s needs.
Sun’s Rise: Draw 2 decree cards and place them face-up near the board. Players will be able to vote on these throughout the day—the decree with the most votes will pass.
Then, draw 3 cultists from the bag and add them to the hideout, and then resolve all the cultists in the hideout (including any that may have been placed there during the previous round) in numerical order. Cult leaders are unnumbered red tokens and are resolved last. Each cultist will go to its numbered spot and block that location, and will also affect the threat board.
On the threat board, there are three spaces marked 1–6, 7–12, and 13–18. If the spot corresponding to the cultist has no threat card, draw a threat card and place it there. If it already has a spot, add a trouble token to the card. If there are enough threat tokens to meet the number in the top corner, then the threat is triggered: follow the effects and then discard the threat card.
To resolve a cult leader, first add a threat card or trouble token to all three slots on the threat board. Then, put the cult leader token in the spot at the bottom of the board. If both leaders have been drawn, then the cultist bag resets: return all cultist tokens from the discard area on the board as well as any cultists that players have arrested back to the bag, along with the cult leader tokens.
Day’s Light: Players take turns placing their workers and Seeker on the various spaces to take actions. Your Seeker is a special worker that can go outside of the city (to the threat board and the lighthouse site), but can also be placed inside the city like the other workers.
Choose a worker from your board and place it into an empty space; if you go to one of the higher tiers in the city, you’ll need to pay taxes to the coffer, a separate supply specifically for taxes. Then, you may either use the effect of that location, or arrest an adjacent cultist (taking the token and placing it into your personal supply). Some locations have multiple effects—if so, you only get one of them.
Locations may give you resources, let you make various trades, or draw research cards, which are one-time-use cards. Some locations let you vote: you may place an influence token from your board onto one of the available decrees. There are also locations that will train the worker you sent there—there are 6 different skills that will let you avoid paying taxes, place workers even in occupied spaces, and so on. Some spaces will give you cult influence—you place your influence tokens in the cult space on the board, and the player with the most influence there is the Conspirator. (Ties go to the player who most recently placed influence there.)
At the bottom of the board there are a few locations that have a rectangular space next to them—these are not numbered and any number of workers can go there. One of them, City Planning, lets you upgrade locations, flipping them to the more powerful side and giving you points. Place one of your influence tokens on the upgraded location—you are now the patron of that location, and when other players use the location, you gain the patron bonus.
Outside of the city, you can thwart threats by sending your Seeker to a location on the threat board and paying the required resources shown at the bottom. You immediately score the points shown on the card, and take the card itself—some places will let you trade threat cards for other benefits.
After placing a worker, you may optionally run an errand, like paying for one of the city needs or sending a supply shipment to the lighthouse. To meet a city need, you place an influence token next to one of the needs, and then pay the required resources to the supply. You’ll score points for meeting city needs at the end of the day.
To help build the lighthouse, choose one of the options shown on the site, which lets you build 1, 2, or 3 tiers at different costs. Spend the resources shown, place an influence token next to the tier that you paid, and then move the lighthouse tracker up that many spaces. The more of the lighthouse is built, the more points each floor built is worth, and the fewer points the cult will receive.
Night’s Fall: Resolve the city needs. For each row on the track, if there is an influence token next to the need, then it has been met. That player earns 1 point, plus 1 point for each sentry token they have. For each city need that has not been met, draw a cultist from the bag and place it into the hideout area—it will be resolved during the next day. Then, return influence tokens to players.
Resolve the docket: the decree with more votes passes. If there is a tie, the first player (with the medallion) chooses which decree passes. There are a few different types of decrees that do different things when passed. Laws stay in play for the rest of the game and are placed nearby. Orders take effect and are discarded. Elections are awarded to the player with the most votes on the card and give that player a special bonus. Crisis cards will trigger if they are not passed, usually with some sort of bad consequence. Influence tokens used as votes are returned to players.
Then, every cultist still in the city will trigger again, adding threat cards or trouble tokens to the board.
If there are any damage tokens on the lighthouse, move the tracker down one space for each damage. If the tracker is ever moved below the bottom of the track, add one threat card to the hidden threats stack.
Score for the lighthouse: the number left of the current level of the lighthouse is the point value for each floor that you’ve built this round. The cultists score the number to the right of the current level. Then, return all of those influence tokens, draw the next site card, and reset the lighthouse tracker to the bottom.
Everyone retrieves all of their workers and Seeker, and the medallion is passed to the next player.
Lastly, the city coffers are emptied (due to government waste) and returned to the supply.
The game ends after the fifth day. Cards that grant points at the end of the game are resolved now.
Then, reveal the hidden threat cards—the cult gains all of the points shown on those cards.
The player with the most points wins. If the cult has the most points, then the player with the most cult influence wins (but if nobody has cult influence, then the cult wins and all players lose).
Ties are broken in this order:
Back in November, I wrote about the campaign game Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall: it alternates between phases where you explore the city of Din’Lux (and some other towns) and skirmishes where you play tactical battles against various enemies. I played through the entire campaign with two other friends, and we all had a really great experience—we liked the way that your character’s backstory is gradually revealed, and the way that the fights and encounters are woven into the larger narrative. There’s an interesting mechanism the game uses to “remember” decisions that your group has made over the course of the game because sometimes they have consequences down the road.
Since then, Incredible Dream Studios has released two more titles set in the same world of Atios, the first two chapters (of a planned three) of Kinfire Delve, a compact cooperative dungeon crawl that is mostly just a deck of cards and some dice. Each box pits two of the six Seekers from Kinfire Chronicles against increasingly challenging bosses, and if you have multiple copies you can mix and match them or combine them to play with more players. I’ll have a review of those down the line, but it has been very fun to play as the same characters in a different style of game.
The storyline of Kinfire Chronicles involves a magical darkness that twists and changes the things that enter it, and the kinfire lanterns and lighthouses that the city uses to protect its boundaries. Kinfire Council picks up the story where that one ended, with a discovery that will enable Din’Lux to help surrounding villages build their own kinfire lighthouses. Your primary opponents are the Cult of Altan, who believe that the kinfire is unnatural and that the citizens should allow the darkness to consume the city.
This time, you don’t primarily play as the Seekers (though they do make an appearance as one of your workers). Instead, you are the Councilors of Din’Lux, and although you are all (mostly) agreed that the lighthouses need to be built and the cultists should be stopped, you also have your own agendas. You want the credit for ushering in this new era for Din’Lux, and if that leads to a little infighting on the council, well …
Some parts of the game will feel very familiar to anyone who has played a worker placement game: you have a limited number of workers and each one can only do one thing per round, and spaces are limited. You’ll often be trying to guess where other players are planning to go, because maybe you want to get there first. And, of course, most of the placements are in service of some combination of gathering needed resources or spending those resources to accomplish some task (and get points, of course).
But there are lots of little tweaks that set Kinfire Council apart, too. The Councilors themselves also have special abilities as well: Hierophant Selen is not above dipping into the coffers; Guildmaster Leera can send any of her workers outside the city; Talos can spend research cards as a wild resource. You start with one special worker—your Seeker—who can go outside of the city to a few special locations. Moreover, each Seeker has a special ability—the guard can enter a space with a cultist and arrest them and use the location, and the scholar can take research cards in place of another resource. So right from the start, there’s a bit of asymmetry, and you have to figure out how to make the most of the random pairings of Councilor and Seeker.
On top of that, you’ll be able to train your standard workers as well. Each of the six abilities that the Seekers have are traits that can be learned (at a price!) by going to certain locations. It can feel costly, sending a worker to a location just to train, because there are only 5 rounds. However, it can really pay off when you need to use a location that somebody else has taken, or you’re short some coin to pay your taxes, or you really want to get a jump on arresting some cultists.
The cultists themselves are also an interesting feature with multiple effects: they show up at random and take up spaces on the board—so annoying!—but they also contribute to the threat cards, which have various effects from damaging the lighthouse to increasing the city needs. They can even damage a city location, which becomes unusable until somebody takes an action to repair it. On the one hand, you want a few cultists around because you can arrest them and then turn them in for various rewards. On the other, if you don’t manage to clear them all out of the city before nightfall, then they get closer to triggering those threats.
Then there’s the decrees. There are generally just two to choose from, though there are effects that can add more. Thematically it’s a little funny that you’re not voting yes/no on each decree independently, but rather the decrees are competing with each other and only one can win each day. (Look, there’s only so much legislation we can deal with each day, okay?) Elections provide benefits to the person who stuck the most votes on it, but crises can have some seriously bad effects if you don’t pass them. Sometimes that can present a real dilemma between city needs and personal wants. I mean, sure, this decree means that the city will need a bit more money every day, but isn’t it worth it so that I get more research cards so that I can be of even more help to the city? What’s more, getting votes usually requires you to go to specific locations—which means you’re spending an action to vote rather than, say, fighting off that wyvern that’s threatening the city.
In some sense, it feels a bit like a cooperative game, where there is an overarching goal (build those lighthouses!) and lots of little fires to put out (arrest cultists! meet the city needs!). And you really don’t want the city to fall apart, so there is some amount of collaboration that happens—we often discussed whether somebody was planning to deal with a particular threat, because you don’t want people wasting their actions collecting the same things, and then having other city needs go unmet. But the individual scoring means that you don’t always do what’s best for the entire group, and it really did feel a bit like being on a city council with a bunch of other overly ambitious people.
The Conspirator role is another interesting wrinkle. Certain locations let you gain cult influence, and whoever has the most influence with the cult is the Conspirator and will win if the cultists score the most. It’s a dangerous game, though: in most cases, you can retrieve your influence tokens from spaces on the board when needed, like giving up a patron bonus because you need the token to vote. Cult influence is never returned to you, though, and your total supply of tokens is limited, so gaining influence in the cult has an opportunity cost. If you get into a competition with other players to be Conspirator, then you better be pretty certain that the cult is going to win!
I’m really enjoying the Atios universe as a whole. I like the concept of multiple different games set in the same world, with each one adding a bit more to the story. The games also have some fun overlap: the character cards from Delve can be used in Chronicles as an alternate portrait, and the Seeker standees in Council can also be swapped with those from Chronicles in case you want to change up their outfits. While playing Kinfire Council, we recognized a lot of the locations and characters that we’d encountered in Chronicles, and we even saw some threat cards based on things from the Delve series.
I’m excited for Kinfire Council—since there have been some tweaks and changes to things from the prototype version I have, I look forward to playing the finished game to see how it all fits together. I’ve gotten a rundown of the changes and they feel like they’ll add some nice tension by giving the cultists a bit of an unknown advantage, while also fixing the length of the game (since the prototype could go longer than 5 rounds). Now’s a great chance to give the world of Atios a try!
For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Kinfire Council Kickstarter page!
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
This post was last modified on April 30, 2024 3:23 am
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