Designed by: Stefano Luperto
King Up! (also published as King Me!) is a game of Machiavellian scheming, jostling for power in the courts, and having your plans deflate like a punctured helium balloon.
It’s also very very simple. The board shows the royal castle, with the coveted throne room at the top and levels of descending importance beneath it. Thirteen discs represent the various nobles all seeking to make claim to the throne: the king is dead, and a new monarch must be elevated to power. You’re not one of them, but you have a vested interest in whom it will be: everyone is given a secret card that tells you which of the six nobles you’d like to make the most influential.
At the start of the game twelve of these nobles are placed out by the players on levels 1-4, with the thirteenth confined to the lowly dungeon (level zero). Then everyone takes turns in standard clockwise fashion, which couldn’t be simpler: push a single noble up a single level toward (or onto) the throne, with the caveat that each level can only hold four nobles. If you (or anyone) pushes a noble onto the throne itself, there is instantly a vote by all players as to whether they stay there – if the answer is a universal yes, then the round is over and all nobles are scored according the levels they currently occupy; obviously the throne itself being the highest-scoring.
However if even a single player votes no, then that noble is ejected from the castle (and the game) in disgrace, and the jostling and elevating continues.
King Up’s catch is this: you have unlimited yes votes, but only two no votes, so they should be used shrewdly and sparingly. There’s both brinkmanship and risk-taking in who gets onto the throne and when, and whether you spend a precious no vote on a noble you want to reject, or trust that someone else will. After each successful succession, scores are recorded as the game resets; and after the third round the player with the most points is over. It’s possible to win the game without ever winning the throne!
Plenty, but as it's all kind of inadvertent, there's not much chance of anyone feeling offended.
Low. Turns are generally really quick, and when it's not your turn you're invested in what other players are doing anyway.
Low, although poker players may find a bit of table-reading and intention-decoding comes in handy.
It doesn't vary hugely from play to play, other than the starting positions of the aspirants and who you're backing yourself.
3-6
Players
6+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
King Up! pretty much hangs on a single mechanic, but does so with a breezy and conspiratorial air. Pushing all your nobles up as far and as quickly as you can may well not be a good move - someone will push them to the throne and before you know it, they've all been kicked out of court. On the other hand, rounds can end very abruptly when everyone is hoping someone else votes no, and an unwanted monarch is elected as a result! I don't think the game shimmers with brilliance or offers a huge amount of replayability, but as one in the cupboard for occasional visits, it's fast-moving fun in a tense twenty-odd minutes.