THE CITY OF KINGS REFRESHED (Special Order)

⚠️ Special order — final sale: we order this specifically for you from our distributor, so it cannot be cancelled or refunded and ships a bit later than an in-stock item. If Poké Jeux is unable to fulfill it (e.g. distributor allocation), you are refunded in full — no fee.

⚠️ Commande spéciale — vente finale : nous commandons cet article spécifiquement pour vous chez notre distributeur ; il ne peut être annulé ni remboursé et est expédié un peu plus tard qu'un article en stock. Si Poké Jeux ne peut l'honorer (ex. allocation du distributeur), vous êtes remboursé en totalité — sans frais.

With The City of Kings going out of stock a while back I thought its 5th anniversary would be the perfect time to take the lessons learned and bring it back with a little refresh.

The goal of these updates is to provide players with greater control over the game, to empower some previously weaker options, and to make the game more approachable for those looking for a slightly less challenging game. It was important to not takeaway from the existing experience or to change what the game is, not to change any artwork and to keep component changes as minimal as possible so existing game owners could still enjoy the game.

Let's talk about the 4 changes.

Attention

When you gather or scavenge for resources in The City of Kings you roll dice to determine how much you get. Sometimes you gain attention tokens and when you get your 4th token a creature will spawn. This risk element to collecting resources is important to the game experience. It stops you collecting unlimited resources and forces you to choose between close dangerous resource locations, and distant but safer resource locations. As you level up your resource collecting skills, you start to roll more dice and with that comes both the chance to collect more resources but also gain more attention tokens. The intent of the original design was to make it more efficient to gather more resources as you can get more per action, without changing the risk factor. However, a lot of players choose not to upgrade their resource collecting stats as they don't want to risk rolling 2, 3, or 4 attention tokens in a single action. For example, if you roll 2 dice on a location with 1 attention token then you could increase it to 3 tokens. But if it already had 2 tokens, you now risk spawning a creature which makes using a "semi-safe" space dangerous.

The change

In the Refreshed Edition you can now only ever get a maximum of 1 attention token per work action, regardless of how many attention symbols you roll. You will either get 1 or 0 attention tokens, thus making upgrading these stats more powerful and less risky.

Equipment

The equipment system sometimes will be the immediate answer to your problems and sometimes won't. More specifically, giving you the chance to get items you don't need now, which you can then plan how to use later, rather than always just giving you what you needed. The benefit of this system is having to look into options.

The change

The equipment cards have now been split into 2 decks and whenever you get to draw an equipment card you may choose which deck you take it from. The first deck only contains equipment anyone can use immediately (legs and body slots). The second deck contains a mixture of all types of equipment, weighted towards head and arms.

Quests

From killing creatures, gathering resources, travelling to locations, stacking wood, or simply gambling, quests should add variety to an adventure and introduce you to the world. There is a lot of variation and it really does shake up your game. However, some quests spawn creatures and creatures in The City of Kings are very different to most games in that they are extremely hard. You're only going to fight 5-7 creatures in most sessions and each will make you have to stop and think about how to overcome it. With quests offering a chance at spawning an extra creature many players see them as too dangerous, especially when they are already struggling and need a solution. This is particularly problematic as quests should be one of the options to overcome difficult situations.

The change

Quests are now optional and when you first read a quest you will immediately decide whether it is something you want to deal with or not. If you choose to not do the quest, you simply continue on your way and ignore the quest that was described. This means if you draw a creature spawning quest at a time that it would be problematic, you may opt not to spawn the creature. You will not get a replacement quest, which may…