I’d forgotten we’d discussed changing game night from Thursday to Wednesday and only remembered when my daughter showed up on the doorstep, ready to game.
I didn’t have the next Jaws of the Lion scenario ready, and we’d just played Terraforming Mars. Me, I wanted to play Mahjong, but I wasn’t hearing a lot of enthusiasm about it. Tom suggested Heart of Crown, so that’s what we played. I hauled out the card table and we got to setting up the game.
Heart of Crown is a “Dominion”-like game. In these sorts of card games, every player starts out with the same hand, and works to improve that hand via buying new cards and getting rid of bad cards until they have a perfect engine of economic brilliance going, whereon they win the game.
In Heart of Crown, you are working to gain the support of one of several anime princesses, who you then work toward placing on your nation’s throne, by buying the support of politicians with the fruits of your vast farming villages, cities, and larger cities. some of which you will grant to your chosen princess to serve as her domain.
Each princess brings something different to the table. One comes with her own political base, meaning you need buy fewer politicians for her. Another lets you ignore certain penalties. The “princess” I backed in both the games we played were actually two princesses, twins, who let you take a number of additional turns equal to the number of princesses already in play, plus one.
In the original “Dominion”, and similar games, you have several stacks of action and attack cards that may be bought to help build your economic engine or just to slow down your opponents. Heart of Crown does this as well, except the random market is built from a randomly shuffled supply, and so a card you want to buy might not be available just then.
This addition of randomness into the game makes Heart of Crown far friendlier to casual players.
If you’ve never played Dominion, then you should 🙂 But once you’ve grown bored with the mechanical play of that game, maybe try Heart of Crown and start building strategies on the fly?
