The King’s Dilemma

Over a decade ago I ran through an entire series of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ gamebooks, via email, for a friend (The Avenger! series of gamebooks). In this series, one will grow from a little baby ninja to a ninja who will do many things, including spending an entire book trying to manage the competing interests and factions of an underworld city. Taking your council meetings, trying to work out how many evil cults to permit, should you institute a window tax, is it wise to take that private meeting with someone who is Definitely Not An Assassin. 

It was an incredibly ambitious feat that, after finishing the book and going through a detailed post-mortem, does not always offer you as much freedom and intricacy as it might imply. But that is not the point, and does not diminish the experience, because playing through you don’t know what matters and what doesn’t, and the possibilities feel endless. The beauty of the CYOA books is also that by presenting you with clearly spelled out options, you know that there is a world where you did implement the Window Tax. It was on Page 186. And who knows what pages beyond that.

The King’s Dilemma is almost exactly this, in board game form, in a dark fantasy setting. Two to five (but you can increase this to six or seven without much mechanical impact) of you will unfurl a Choose Your Own Adventure for the Kingdom. Every single round of the game is reading a short card that poses two choices - do you free the slave, do you allow the trade in gray bread, do you invite the witch to court. All of you vote for a binary outcome, throwing as many of your scarce ‘voting’ tokens behind it as you see fit, to decide what to do (so if you really care about something you can lean in heavily, but be prepared to sit quietly through some other rounds). These choices will add up, many of them instructing you to open an envelope - of which there are over a hundred, with three more dilemma choice cards in most - and add the cards inside to your ‘Dilemma deck’, creating your own personal kingdom narrative as your choices navigate you down an unwinding river delta of fifteen to thirty ninety-minute games. 

This is the core of the game, and if this sounds interesting to you, you will enjoy this. I can actually see this being enjoyable just as a solo experience, or a duo - ignoring the rest of the game and just playing it narratively. The amount of text on each card is perfect, providing context and background without overloading you, and the twists and turns of the narrative create that ‘just one more’ feeling of wanting to see where each decision goes.

You will also represent a house in this kingdom, with its own background, lore, and - wonderfully -  hidden secret objective that you have no idea mechanically how to get at the start of the game and that may only emerge through the narrative. ‘Find a way to transmute gold’, ‘Conquer another kingdom’, or ‘Embrace immortality’.  It’s nice to see people suddenly really, really, care about whether we import those texts, bake that cake, or hold a joust; the additional lore and background to your house also gives you a framing and ethos to shape your decision making around, and there are a very large selection of houses to suit most temperaments.

So far, this all works very well together. The area where the most tension is created is in the ‘scoring’. Each game will have you given a scoring card, from a selection of eight or so, which will push you in a certain direction -  more militaristic, more noble, more dastardly, and so on. During each round, as well as a narrative outcome, various ‘kingdom metrics’ will go up or down. These don’t permanently affect the kingdom (they’re reset each game) but do influence the scoring of each game, with ‘Prestige’ (yay!) and ‘Crave’ (boo!) being awarded to players as a result, that is marked on their house card.

The problem that this can introduce is that it can slow down the decision making if one decides to start consulting the various trackers, or start trying to solicit bribes for every single minor decision, to try and ‘maximise points’. The game does not tell you what relevance having more Prestige and Crave will have, and even worse, these ‘scoring’ cards are not particularly well-balanced and involve a fair amount of analysis as to what is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ position.

In my view, this game is at its most fun when one is embracing their role, ad-libbing amusing speeches, letting people have their time in the sun when it's a topic or area they really care about to go head-to-head, and - most importantly - keeping a good cadence of new choices and outcomes flowing. Players trying to play this to maximise points for their house is a little unfortunate when it contradicts their narrative goals, but it is actively detrimental when it slows down the pace and diverts attention from the narrative.

Lots of roleplaying games will advocate for a ‘Session Zero’, where people will discuss the tone, expectations, and playstyles they envisage in order to ensure as harmonious an experience as possible, and I can see that being a benefit here. I personally removed some of the rules regarding multiple decisions being tracked to have compounding effects on the Kingdom’s stats, because I wanted to cut down on the administrative and mental burden of tracking these, and I also experimented with telling people to keep their scoring cards hidden (or just giving them vague guidelines) until the end of the round to keep the focus on the story and roleplaying.

I note this particularly because I think this is otherwise a wonderful game for ‘non-gamers’ to engage with. Approaching it less as a ‘game’ and more of a guided story-telling and role-playing exercise is, I think, the way to go, and a willingness to grease the mechanical wheels here and there is a small price to pay for the chance to experiment with creating plague-carrying wasps as a form of early experimental bioweapon. After all, what could go wrong?