Valeria: Card Kingdoms Review

Daily Magic Games has recently released Valeria: Card Kingdoms and the top level “what you should know” about it is that it is a light, straightforward tableau building game driven by cards and dice. Fans of Machi Koro, Splendor, Dominion and Catan should take note because a DNA analysis reveals that all of the above are this baby’s daddies. As such, it comes across as an accessible and approachable option that may have more appeal to players still fresh to the world of hobby games than to those- like me- that will rattle off this design’s lineage as seen above.

It’s a good-looking game. The illustrations are very well done with a unique character despite typical fantasy subject matter. On the table, the array of cards depicting citizens ranging from Archers to Miners to Paladins to Butchers is colorful and I love seeing classic monsters like Owlbears out there. In addition to over 200 cards, which are sorted into sets like a typical deckbuilder, you get two chunky custom dice that are going to drive everything that happens in the game.

Starting with just a lowly peasant and a knight in your tableau, you roll two dice on your turn. Each of your cards has a number on it, and if either die or the sum hits that number it either produces resources, converts resources or executes other abilities. When it’s not your turn, your opponents’ die rolls activate an off-turn effect- which could be better or lesser than your on-turn effect depending on the card. Naturally, cards with the 6-7-8 values tend to hit the most often and they represent your safest bets. But the cards with the lesser odds often have the more interesting or conditional effects. There are three resources- gold (used to buy cards from the central display), strength (used to fight monsters in five stacks of available baddies) and magic (a wild that has to be played with at least one of what you are duplicating). None of your cards hit? Don’t worry, the game gives you a free one of your choice.

I liked this design right off the bat because of this set of gambling game mechanics- one of the things that everybody loved about Catan 20 years ago was how you watch every turn to see what your payout is on each resource roll. It’s a simple investment/profit curve with a huge element of chance than anyone can understand and enjoy.

However, Valeria misses the mark egregiously because there are simply too many resources in the game. I have never stated this about a game in my 15 years of writing about games, but the math is just totally off. It starts off well enough, with players having to choose between the cards on display to work out combinations and build with an eye toward specific goals. But around halfway into it- when players have more developed tableaus- it almost becomes repetitive to buy more citizen cards. There tends to be a breaking point in the game where players no longer want for resources, which strips the design of tension and makes it more about making the best choice every turn than about using the resources at hand to make the best out of what you have. There is no trading, limited theft, the monsters don’t fight back and when you are looking at spending 20, 30 resources a turn across two actions it feels like something isn’t quite right.

It doesn’t help that there is no geographic limitation on what you can invest in. Unless a stack of citizen cards sells out, you can buy cards with values from 1 to 12 without restriction- unlike Catan, for example, where you may not be able to invest in prime numbers or on suboptimal numbers that pay out in rarer resources. There is no “robber” limiting a player’s resource holdings and in games with more than two players, the game is just constantly handing you resources. And in to the sum paying out, which increases the resource availability quite dramatically, doubles pay out on each card twice. So three cards of a doubled number will pay out six times, flooding your coffers with tokens and ensuring you have carte blanche next turn to buy just about anything you want. It says a lot that you get 48 of each resource token and you still need 5x and 10x tokens to track them.

What’s more, all of this expenditure often feels like you are choosing between multiple options that yield similar returns on investment. The goal of the game is to earn victory points, which come from defeating monsters and purchasing Domain cards that give your tableau an overall benefit (such as MORE resources each turn) or an immediate bonus (like MORE resources). But you are also dealt a Duke card at the beginning of the game that gives you a couple of formulas for endgame bonuses- extra points for defeating monsters, collecting certain classes of citizens, having sets of- you guessed it- resources, and so forth. So there is a sense that the Duke cards lay out an agenda for the player, but over the games I’ve played I’ve not felt like the decisions they guide you toward are necessarily any more lucrative than other available options. I saw too many “if I spend this, I get 3vp, if keep it I get 3vp” kinds of equations. If I have to spend a magic token to beat a monster and my reward is a VP and a magic token , I’m not sure what the point of spending the magic token was in the first place.

Interaction is extremely low, and that coupled with the lack of tension or difficult choices makes Valeria feel very passive. When as toothy as the gameplay gets is grabbing the final boss monster in a stack before someone else spends their giant pile of resources, we’re well into multiplayer solitaire territory. Speaking of which, there is a solo mode that feels something like Thunderstone’s one player game, but I didn’t find it particularly compelling when other single-player card game options offer more dynamic and challenging gameplay.

So Valeria is not for me, even though I generally like these kinds of designs. I’m sure there are players for whom the easy resources (and lack of frustration) will be appealing and I think that fans of Machi Koro or Splendor who are looking for a similar gently competitive activity that is just a step or two up in complexity will find it to be an appealing title. It’s best as a two player game by far, and it would likely be successful with couples interested in lighter designs. I also think that for older kids- say reading age up to 12 or 14- Valeria could be a good option for low-impact play. If you go in on it, there is a lot of variety- like Dominion or other deckbuilders, you only use a subset of cards each game so it’ll stay reasonably fresh if you take to it. On top of that, there are already expansions on the way if this is your kind of thing, including two small card packs that add events that trigger when common stacks are depleted. And guess what? Some of them give you more resources.