Kingpin

Min engelska recension ifrån BGG.

I play games with different groups of people and thereby under different circumstances.
For a while now I've played with the gamers at the local club every tuesday and on the weekends with my family. While a lot of games see much action I don't have that many 2 player games to play with my significant other when her son has gone to bed. Naturally I was excited when I saw the box of Kingpin which not only promised a game with cool grapichs but also some tense 2 player action.

The game is pretty straight forward and boils down to each player controlling a set of tiles which represent their Kingpin's minions. These tiles are eqipped with different sets of icons which are used to manipulate the opponent by taking out his tiles. On a players turn he can choose to move or play another tile onto the board. In each case he moves a clock token down one step on an actiontrack. Or the player can choose to attack another tile and this is where the game offers it's interesting play.

The thing is that a tile with a gun token eliminate another tile by beeing equal or exceeding his opponent's health in numbers but all the tiles adjecent to the two tiles starting the shootout also participate in the conflict and therefore you can find yourself in situations where quite a lot of pieces go off the board at the same time. Another feature that comes from the array of icons depicted on the tiles is that they can support each other, increasing their strength, or reducing an opponents strength.
Some tiles have the ability to attack after moving and these raging ones you got to look out for since the winning conditions state that once one of your tiles reach your opponents start zone and go off the board, you win the game. Alternatively you can win by placing three of your tiles in the midzone of the board without your opponent having any representation there, you kill all your opponent's tiles or your enemy slips of the actiontrack.

What I like.
I got to say I like this game and it's basically beacuse it plays fast. None of our games have ever exceeded 15 minutes of play and still the game offers a good share of strategy for the time it demands. I've for example learned that a Gunman backed up with a Raid oriented tile can constitute a very destructive combination. I also like the graphics and while some may say that it makes the tiles cluttered, I have no problems with that. I also like the different winning conditions and while the designers recomend you to skip the actiontrack I think it actually brings more tension to the game but I'm willing to try leaving it out in the future.

What I don't like is the box. While it offers a solid, fun game and stunning cover art it's simply too big. I will bring the game along to the pub and I will do fine bringing it in a bag but when it comes down to storage I can't get my head around the size of it. This touches my next concern which is the game's replayability, which I at the moment can't judge to be all that low since you get three different styled gangs, but I really hope that the Krzysztof's and Mr. Cywicki has some sort of expansion/s planned to fill that big box.

So what's next?
All in all I think that Kingpin is a neat game which fills an important niche in my gaming habits. It's somewhat easy to bring and it will probably be played many times but it leaves me with a feeling of expectation. While a great game for the right circumstances I must say that if the game is to live on and not fade into the darkness that is the back of my game shelf, it demands expansions. The game holds great potential to evolve beyond it's current form and if the designers just respect the playing time I don't think they will have any problems to make an exciting game even more tense and more fun.