A Struggle Against the Dark Lord in Valeria: Card Kingdoms
Recruit citizens and build domains to establish a foothold and defeat a variety of monsters in Valeria: Card Kingdoms.
My current goal is a pseudo-alphabetical challenge to get through a lot of my unplayed games. For the longest time, I’ve always referred to this one as Card Kingdoms of Valeria. That’s not it! Ha ha! Valeria: Card Kingdoms is the proper name, and it’s a game my husband and I have a lot of content for. I was excited to explore it all as a solo experience!
Game Overview
Game Name: Valeria: Card Kingdoms
Publication Year: 2016
Designer: Isaias Vallejo
Artist: Mihajlo Dimitrievski
Publisher: Daily Magic Games
Solo Mode: Included in the Base Game
Monsters form the biggest threat to the land, and citizens provide ways to earn gold, strength, and magic to go to battle. Such colorful artwork! With plenty of variety, there are all sorts of combinations to uncover and individuals to encounter on the quest to defeat the solo Dark Lord.
First Play
Janaury 8, 2022
Complexity
2
Latest Play
December 25, 2023
Expansions
5
Setup Time
10 Minutes
Lifetime Plays
14
Play Time
30 Minutes
High Score
128
Game Area
26" x 28"
Low Score
82
Rolling with the Flow
There was absolutely no reason to pick up some extra dice packs… But these are some really pleasant components! Much bigger than I anticipated and fun to toss about.
Of course, the solo mode meant I needed a grand total of 2 dice. Lots of colors to choose from, though!
These form the basis of resource production. Each citizen card has a value from 1 to 12, and the individual dice plus their sum indicate which citizens are activated each round.
Dice also show which columns the Dark Lord attacks with… But I’m getting ahead of myself. Onto the play area!
Stacks Upon Stacks
A total of 5 columns match up with values 1-5 on the dice, thereby triggering the Dark Lord to slowly deplete the decks. But only if the corresponding monsters still stand!
The very top row includes a set of monsters from a specific region, all increasing in difficulty up to the leader.
Citizens form the middle rows, and these may be recruited for gold at various rates. Focus too much on a certain die value, and those citizens become more expensive.
Finally, domains represent different areas that may be invested in for bonuses and additional victory points.
Kingdom Ruler
A duke or duchess card provides unique ways to score additional victory points at the end of the game. I chose El’Syn, Saint of Shadows, for this first play!
The reference cards helped out, particularly with the iconography, yet it was the resource tracker that I loved.
With +10 tokens to attach to the right side, this made it easy to track everything without needing to collect a giant pile of tokens. Much easier and simpler, indeed!
I had plenty of experience with the multiplayer game, so I was ready to take on the Dark Lord and fight to victory!
Battle of the Ruins
It was fun to recruit citizens, yet I quickly saw that this was going to be a race to battle the monsters. The fewer stacks there were, the fewer times the Dark Lord activated.
The multiplayer experience often calls for careful planning so that an opponent won’t be able to claim the best rewards after a new monster is revealed.
I realized that I would always get the maximum bonus on every monster boss card… No competition here!
Every piece of art was amazing, though. I loved looking at all of the different locations and characters. Awesome!
Endless Victory Points
The final scoring was rather lopsided… I won by an incredible margin, even after checking the rules multiple times and re-doing my math. Success, indeed!
Yet I kept on playing, even adding to the difficulty as much as I could, only to keep winning. So long as I focused on strength, the monster stacks depleted very quickly.
There wasn’t much of an enjoyable challenge, either. It felt mechanical, rather than thematic, to fight monsters.
I kept looking for ways to make this harder for myself… Unless this was a case of exceptionally lucky dice. Ha!
The Value of Consistently Losing
As much as I love to win solo games, there’s a big distinction between earning a win and getting there with little effort. My new games should be challenging, giving me a chance to learn the strategies and nuances not necessarily spelled out in the rules. Aside from a couple of rare examples, I want to lose pretty consistently when I first play!
Maybe it helps that I like to take my time with new games… Losing usually comes easily. Ha! Yet those losses come with lessons. It might be 30 seconds of thinking through a single decision while I’m resetting the play area. Or I might have an idea pop up in the middle of play, inspired by a combination or sequence I had only vaguely considered before.
The trouble comes in when I win too easily. Winning consistently is a different matter, since this often happens with the games I feel I’ve mastered. No worries… There are only a few. Ha! I think it comes down to feeling that I earned the victory, though, by working through challenges and making the best decisions based on the knowledge I gained.
As can be seen by my final scores, either I completely misunderstood the rules or the challenge simply wasn’t present. Even ignoring that, though, the solo mode felt like it was missing something. Actually, it might have been that experience of learning by trying… I only needed to fight monsters quickly, and the paths to get there were pretty clear.
Surprise Events
One element I enjoyed the most was the sense of surprise that could happen with the exhausted deck. The standard cards simply track the main trigger that ends the game.
Yet monster events can add troublesome situations or additional monsters, while events might provide bonuses.
The best option was to simply shuffle them altogether! I had no idea what might be in store, which added some fun.
I also went with the mixed citizen stacks. Rather than using a single type for each value, I had 4 that might show up in unexpected quantities. Much more exciting!
Session Overview
Play Number: 1-4
Expansions: Many
Solo Mode: Included in the Base Game
Play Details: Standard and Hard Difficulty Levels
Outcome: 82-34, 102-24, 128-46, and 112-35 (4 Wins)
Talk about victory! I enjoyed mixing in the new events and expansion citizens, although this variety didn’t quite give me what I was hoping for. The Dark Lord was very mechanical and didn’t pose much of a threat, especially when I managed to empty certain monster stacks. Luckily, there was a completely new solo mode to try out next!
%
10 Plays
Affordability
Price & Value
9
Functionality
Challenges & Mechanics
9
Originality
Design & Theme
5
Quality
Components & Rules
7
Reusability
Achievement & Enjoyment
7
Variability
Distinctness & Randomness
7
+ Pros (Positives)
- Dice rolls provide a fun way to randomize which citizens activate each round and play into who to recruit next.
- Managing the solo opponent is quick and doesn’t require much thought so the focus is on the overall strategy.
- The artwork is beautiful and colorful across all sorts of cards, ranging from serene landscapes to huge monsters.
- Being able to mix up the citizens for each value adds an excellent amount of variety and different decisions.
- Every resource is easily tracked on the player board and +10 tokens keep things simple with limited components.
- Icons help keep the cards free from extra text and summary cards help define this iconography at a glance.
– Cons (Negatives)
- Gameplay is heavily focused on fighting monsters as quickly as possible, which makes the domains unneeded.
- There is a huge amount of sorting, shuffling, and resorting the different card decks during setup and cleanup.
- Even with a lot of variety in the citizens and monsters, the overall flow and goals all remain fairly repetitive.
- At a certain point, resources accumulate faster than they can be spent, thereby reducing their importance.
Victory Conditions
Complete the Book or Dungeon
- Overall Goal Progress 100%
Goals and Milestones
Complete Book One: The Prophecy.
Complete Book Two: A Trail of Eyes.
Complete Book Three: The Shores of Kosk.
Complete Book Four: Blackest Death.
Complete Book Five: Midnight Whispers.
Complete Book Six: The Final Breach.
Complete Dungeon Delve: The Forgotten Temple.
Win at least 1 game at the standard difficulty level.
Win at least 1 game at the hard difficulty level.
Continue the Conversation
What do you like about Valeria: Card Kingdoms? Have you succeeded against the Dark Lord? Although I breezed through this session, I have my eye on a new experience with a recently released expansion. That should open up a campaign-style story and change a lot! There’s a lot of potential with this game, and I look forward to playing again!
I had the game at one point. But I did not feel it would add anything I already have with Machi Koro. The box was bigger, and the theme would not appeal to the people I would propose the game to. And the solo mode… It fell flat to me. So I went on and gave it away.
I still have Machi Koro !
Very interesting! I’ve played the newer version that changes things up, but I actually prefer this one. The expansion definitely improves the solo experience. Without it, I can imagine I would want to pass it along, too… Although my husband enjoys playing it multiplayer a lot. Ha ha!