This election day everything came up Kessler in all of our local races and even in some major headline-grabbing national races so as a celebratory present to myself, I popped open one of my perpetually simmering browser tabs and added to cart a board game I had been musing over and a few weeks later Kinfire Council arrived. Kinfire Council is part of Incredible Dream’s Kinfire Chronicles world where an evil Darkness has swept across the land and only one major city, Din’Lux stands as a bulwark thanks to its magic lighthouse. The original Kinfire Chronicles is a cooperative story game in a similar vein to Gloomhaven. Kinfire Council by contrast is a competitive worker placement game which has many similarities to Lords of Waterdeep but with many key differences.
The goal of Kinfire Council is to have the most points at the end of five rounds or, if playing with three or more players, to help the insidious Cultists have the most points and to have accrued the most influence with them. Points are earned numerous ways in a point-salad of municipal improvement. Most of the action of the game involves assigning workers to various locales in and around the city of Din’Lux or carrying out errands to try to help the city and other communities withstand the dire forces around them.
At the start of the game, you randomize a pairing of Councilors and Worker Sheets. Councilors represent the big movers and shakers in the city and have different starting resources or powers. Workers all include one Seeker who starts with one of the 6 specialized Worker Skills plus has the ability to be placed outside of the city. This is cleverly denoted by having round Worker pieces that slot into round city spaces and a hexagonal base for the Seeker piece that can fit either in the city spaces or in the hexagonal outer spaces. Players take turns selecting which Councilor/Worker combo they want and then collect their starting money and Influence. Influence is a special resource that isn’t discarded when used but is limited so there’s only so much of it that can be assigned each round.
As part of set up, three Threat cards which represent the various machinations of the Cults as well as other (un)natural calamities are drawn and secretly set aside. Over the course of the game, more cards can be added to this secret pile. These will add points to the Cultists’ final score at the end of the game so you never know just how well they are doing until the end.
At the beginning of every round, two Decrees are drawn which players can assign Influence to as votes to determine which one will pass. Some of these offer one time effects or can permanently improve a player. Others are crises which don’t help but ignoring them can cause all sorts of problems. Votes are generally assigned by various spaces on the board where workers can be placed. While there can be some negotiations, that isn’t the main thrust of the game. Whoever holds the first player Speaker’s Medallion token breaks ties.
After Decrees are chosen, the Cultists start to creep around the city. Every round players draw three hidden Cultist tokens from the black cloth bag provided and add them to any tokens from previous rounds. Most tokens will have a number on them which represents a space on the city that they will be clogging up this round unless arrested. The numbers also correspond to three areas outside the city where the Seekers can go try to deal with different threats. Each space can hold one Threat card and as Cultists are activated, you either draw a card into the space or add Trouble tokens to the card. Once enough Trouble tokens are added, it triggers whatever dire effect is on the Threat card. Two of the tokens that can be drawn from the bag are Cult Leaders and they supercharge all the Threat Cards as well trigger a jailbreak which frees any arrested or discarded Cultist tokens and puts them back in the bag for future draws.
Once Cultists have done their nasty business, it’s time for the players to go around taking their turn. Players must assign a Worker or Seeker to a space on the board. The city is divided up into three sections which is helpfully shown by stacking the parts of the board on the plastic organizing trays so you wind up with a neat three level board. The lower part of the city can be moved around freely but there are taxes to use the higher ones. This money is paid into a bowl called the Coffer which can be used by various game effects later on and is emptied out between rounds. All the spaces will either provide resources, votes, research cards, Sentries, extra Errands, opportunities to trade or cash in arrested Cultists or vanquished Thread cards, or provide other impacts. Spaces can be paid to be upgraded claimed by players so that when other players go there, the owner gets a little treat.
In games with three or more players, there are spaces which can help the Cultists and curry favor with them. This can matter if at the end of the game the Cult has more victory points than any of the players. In two player games, this betrayal mechanic is ignored.
Certain spaces let players draw Research cards which can provide nifty bonuses or boosts at any time. Others can give players Sentry tokens which provide bonus points for carrying out specific actions or Errands. Some can also increase the amount of Influence you have. Finally there are spaces and cards that can upgrade Workers and provide them with specialized skills that can allow them to ignore taxes, move to occupied spaces, use space abilities and arrest in the same action, gain extra Research cards and so on. These skills can be very useful and provide a lot of flexibility in planning and moving around.
Instead of using the ability of a city space, players can instead direct their Worker to arrest an adjacent Cultist. This opens up spaces on the board and also prevents the cultists from adding more Trouble tokens to the Threat cards. Arrested Cultists become a resource that can be traded or cashed in at various spaces but if the the Leaders trigger a jailbreak, they can escape from the players before earning a bounty.
Outside the city there are the Threat spaces where Seekers can go trade in resources to vanquish various Threats for points and to avoid the headaches these Threats can bring. There are also available spaces at a nearby community trying to build its own lighthouse to keep the Darkness at bay. These communities last only for one round and have unique offerings for Seekers who travel there as well as particular resources they require to build up their lighthouse.
After taking their Worker action, players can perform one of two Errands. Certain abilities and spaces can increase the number of Errands or what sorts of actions can be performed as Errands. The first Errand is to address the city’s Needs. At the start of the game, the city needs three Supplies to keep the citizens happy and deaf to the licentious missionary appeals of the Cultists. Over the course of the game new Needs can be added by Decrees or other cards. By performing the Errand and discarding the required resource, players can place an Influence token next to it to show that the need is fulfilled. At the end of the round, players earn points for every Need they supplied and any Needs left unfulfilled add another Cultist to the board.
The other Errand is to help build the lighthouse for the neighboring community. Every community has different resources they want and building one, two, or three levels comes with increased costs but also higher point rewards. As the lighthouse gets built, a lighthouse tracker shows how high it goes. At the end of the round, players earn points based on how much they helped build and how high they collectively built the lighthouse. Cultists can damage the lighthouse which causes the tracker to go down at the end of the round before scoring takes place and the lower the tracker, the more points the Cultists earn.
Players take turns assigning their Workers and carrying out errands until all the workers are assigned at which point the end of round phase commences. First city Needs are inspected and points/Cultists are doled out. Next the Docket of Decrees is checked to see which of the various Decrees received the most votes and determining what their impacts are. After that any remaining Cultists on the board add Trouble or Threat Cards and damage to the community lighthouse knocks the tracker down and the Cult scores. Finally the lighthouse provides points to the players who built it up this round and the community is discarded and a new one drawn. The Speaker’s Medallion is passed to the left, Workers come home, and the round ends.
After all five communities have been helped and the fifth round ends, the game is over. Those Hidden Threat cards are revealed and additional points are added to the Cult’s final score. The player with the highest score wins and if the Cult has the higher score then whichever player has the most Influence with the Cult wins. In two-player games, this is ignored and if the Cult has more points then everyone loses.
As a longtime fan of Lords of Waterdeep, it was easy to get into the core mechanic of the game of moving workers around a city and accrues money and resources to meet card’s requirements and earn points. Where the game diverges is in just how many sources of points there are and the very different strategies you can employ the suck them up. It feels much more civically minded as you round up cultists, feed your citizens, revitalize your neighborhoods, go vanquishing looming threats, or help build up your neighbors. The betrayal mechanic feels like a quirky bit of gamesmanship where if everyone is doing their part and keeping the peril at bay everyone benefits but as soon as someone starts siding with the cultists, it can create a real race to the bottom. The art and the setting are very specific and the fact that your workers all have names and small hints of personality and history make them feel much more alive than just nameless tokens your plopping around the board. Having a furry hat seller that was trained to be a merchant sliding into the dock right after I had vanquished the kraken that was blockading our port felt a lot more interesting and engaging.
That being said, there are a lot of fiddly rules to navigate with exceptions and abilities that can be easy to lose track of. The board is very busy and there was a lot of checking and double-checking our player aids to make sure we knew exactly what we were doing. I spent much of a game feeling like I was flailing and assuming I would lose only to take out one big threat that put me just that much ahead of my opponent who had more diligently created an engine throughout the game.
The Threats and Needs at first reminded me of Archipelago and the way that semi-cooperative/mostly competitive game beat you over the stick if you ignored them. In Kinfire Council, it feels like there’s a lot more carrot and not as much stick although it would be curious to see if less paranoid players triggered a great deal more trouble or if having a traitor actively sabotaging things makes all those cultists and threats feel more dire.
Managing Influence is a particularly interesting and/or frustrating puzzle as it provides a lot of opportunity for points but you also need them to weigh in on the votes, gain control of locations for future benefits, or if you’re doubling down on evil, getting caught up in the bidding war to control the Cults. The tight economy of them definitely impacts the choices you can make.
It’s a neat and engaging game and I’m interested in playing more and seeing how all the systems interact together.