It’s a Wonderful Kingdom Review – An Heir-Raising Duel

It’s a Wonderful World was my most-played game during COVID. Bathed in the glow of my computer screen and the chatter of friends through my headset, we played round after round on Tabletop Simulator. It was a great time, in one of the worst times, and one I look back upon fondly.

So I was excited when I heard about It’s a Wonderful Kingdom. Expecting a spiritual successor that keeps the same snappy engine-building mechanics but trims it down for two players, and adds a bluffing twist? It sounded perfect.

Almost too perfect.

How to play

Don’t believe the propaganda. You are the rightful heir to the throne! Unfortunately, someone else thinks they are too. And there’s only one way to settle it: by force. And by “force,” I mean developing your duchy faster and better than your opponent to score the most victory points. Naturally.

Each round of It’s a Wonderful Kingdom starts with a hand of seven cards… plus one extra surprise: a Calamity card. These are the ones you don’t want at the end of the round, like rats infesting your duchy or frost giants slowing everything they touch with their ice magic.

With this hand of eight cards, the drafting begins. You and your opponent take turns placing two cards into two face-up rows. You can split them between the rows or stack both into one. After you place your cards, your opponent chooses which row to take. Then it’s their turn to do the same, and you pick from what’s left.

You also have the option to place two cards face-down each round, adding a touch of trickery. Maybe you’re hiding a must-have card… or maybe you’re baiting your opponent into taking a Trojan Calamity. Who knows?

Once all the cards are claimed, each one can either be:

• Recycled for an instant resource (shown on the card), or
• Slated for construction, which means you plan to build it once you’ve gathered the required resources.

When you construct a card, it’s moved into your duchy, where it’ll help produce even more resources during future turns.

Speaking of which, it’s time for the production phase. In the order of grey, black, yellow, blue, green, each resource type is handed out based on what your duchy produces. The player who produces the most of a given type also earns a supremacy bonus, either training a new soldier or, moving an already trained one into their duchy.

As a point of difference from It’s a Wonderful World, soldiers aren’t worth points at the end of the game. Instead, they’re used to fend off calamities or pay for specific cards.

After four rounds of bluffing, building, and occasionally cursing your own decisions, the player with the most victory points from their completed cards wins, claiming the throne once and for all.

Build Phase: Banger. Draft Phase: Baffler

If you’ve played It’s a Wonderful World (or read my review), you’ll already be familiar with half of what It’s a Wonderful Kingdom brings to the table. The engine-building I loved from the original is back, nearly copy-pasted – with a few smart tweaks.

For starters, soldiers no longer score points. Instead, they’re used for construction and, more importantly, clearing out Calamity cards. There’s also a new card type: Treasure cards. These can’t be built, but when recycled, they give you two resources instead of one. Super handy when you’re trying to squeeze out an extra construction.

Taken on their own, these changes, plus a tighter card pool and better distribution of cards, make the engine-building feel even smoother than before. Not once did I find myself scrambling for grey production or struggling to build a point-generating machine.

But while the back half of each round still delivers that satisfying, point-churning goodness, the front half? Not so much.

Compared to the original, the drafting phase felt flat. Instead of weighing a full hand of cards and deciding what to keep, you’re just picking between two pre-selected options. Most of the time, it’s an easy call, and not a particularly interesting one.

Even with trap cards and a sprinkle of bluffing, the tension never really clicks. There’s no nuance to the bluffing so it usually boils down to, “Is this a Calamity or not?” And even when it is, the punishment often isn’t severe enough to worry you. You’ll likely have the soldiers to clean it up before it causes real trouble.

So yeah, the drafting just didn’t work for me. In fact, it kind of pulled me out of the experience. It’s like settling in for a fantastic movie, only to have someone in the front row scrolling TikTok or Bluesky… or whatever the kids are using these days. The movie is still great (and so is the engine-building in It’s a Wonderful Kingdom), but that little glowing distraction of a sub-par drafting phase keeps yanking your focus away.

Three modules walk into a kingdom…

If there’s one thing It’s a Wonderful Kingdom doesn’t lack, it’s variability, something the original and its expansions had in spades too. It’s genuinely impressive how the designers keep finding fresh ways to change and evolve this engine-building formula. In Kingdom, that variety comes from three optional modules: Menace, Advisors, and Quests.

Let’s start with the Menace module, which is the big one. This swaps out the standard -4 VP Calamity cards for unique threats with actual gameplay effects. Things like Frost Giants that block your construction until you’ve mustered enough soldiers to kick them out, or Thieves that shave off your resource production until they’re dealt with.

These asymmetrical menaces are more fun than the original Calamities, but the iconography can be unclear. Meaning you’ll find yourself flipping back to the rulebook more than you’d like. That aside, these new Calamities rarely feel like actual threats. In our games, they were more like potholes than speed bumps, annoying, but never significant enough to force us to rethink our plans. We always had the spare soldiers to clear them without much fuss.

The same can’t be said about the Advisors module. Which might be why it was my favourite of the bunch. This swaps out the treasure cards for a deck of powerful characters who grant strong, ongoing benefits… as long as you’re willing to keep them supplied with soldiers.

It’s great. Suddenly, soldiers feel like a real strategic resource, not just a thing you throw at Calamities. And since the Advisor powers are actually impactful, you find yourself making smarter, more satisfying long-term plays. It even gives the drafting phase a bit more juice, as now you’re just as likely to hide a great Advisor as you are with a trap card.

The Quest module, though? Meh. It adds a small lineup of public objectives for players to chase, with one “final” objective you must complete to be eligible to win. It’s not bad, but it didn’t feel all that exciting either. Since only the final objective is mandatory, the rest often felt like optional side quests that usually weren’t worth the detour.

So there you have it, It’s a Wonderful Kingdom nails the engine-building once again, but the drafting? That’s the flat tyre on an otherwise smooth ride.