Ruling a great empire in the air and inhabiting beautiful castles, your family is literally and figuratively on a soft (pink) cloud. All that happiness is slowly rising to your head and you are, again literally and figuratively, living on cloud cuckoo land. You are so distracted by this delusion of the clouds that you no longe notice your day-to-day life and as a result you neglect your duties as a monarch, your family is driven apart and you completely lose your way in more ways than one. It’s time to repair the ties and roads between your family’s various castles in Cloudy Kingdom! Does this game manage to rise above the clouds?
Setup and goal
In the simple and beautifully illustrated card game Cloudy Kingdom, players will place cards and use magic to form roads in the clouds between their castles. At the start of the game, a grid is formed with different castles depending on the number of players. A selection of three different magic cards is also compiled for players to use during the game.
Each player chooses a colour of castle and players are ready to play. The player who is the first to connect two of his opposite castles with a route formed by cards (unless they have played a magic card that round) wins!
Gameplay
The gameplay of Cloudy Kingdom is simple and each turn a player can perform 1 of 2 possible actions. Players can choose to take a card from the central draw pile and place it on the grid between the castles in the centre of the table. Players can also choose to deploy one of their magic cards to perform special actions.
If players choose to draw and place a card, they must place the card according to the correct placement rules. Cards should always be placed with the short side to the long side of a castle card or with the short side to the short side of a previously placed card. Players can also place cards crosswise over previously placed cards, this way sometimes creating (new) routes or intersections, sometimes replacing, supplementing or interrupting existing routes. Sometimes a hopeless route is straightened out by a single card. Behind the clouds the sun shines!
So players will enjoy puzzling in this way to connect their castles without helping other players on their way. There is a wide variety of different routes, making for an abstract puzzle that stays interesting and varied.
Magic cards allow players to perform special actions, allowing them to influence the game in a different way. For instance, magic cards allow them to place permanent routes that cannot be removed or replaced, they can remove routes, they have a choice of multiple route cards during their turn and so on. The fact that a different set of available magic cards is used each game creates extra variety and therefore different tactics. Because the publisher has included some extra blank magic cards, you can also experiment with your own devised rules.
Verdict
Cloudy Kingdoms is an interesting abstract and strategic puzzle. In terms of abstract thinking, it somewhat resembles a more complex version of, say, four in a row or Tic Tac Toe, and I certainly don’t mean that in any negative kind of way. I myself am a huge fan of simpler abstract games like Quarto or Pylos (which both also implement these classic concepts into their game design). These are games with a simple set of rules and particularly great depth. In the case of Cloudy Kingdoms, this abstract puzzle is played with cards, rather than playing pieces, and routes that are nicely designed and thus have a bit more theme and character than many other abstract strategy games, making the game feel refreshing. The game can possibly end rather quickly. A fast paced game with a short duration is certainly not a bad thing if you’re looking for a short form of entertainment, but sometimes Cloudy Kingdom is over for just a little too quickly for my taste if you’re playing with two players. Perhaps you wanted to continue to puzzle! That in itself is not a bad form of frustration as it does keep you constantly on your toes.
In my opinion, the placement of routes is very nicely done, because you can place cards crosswise, routes can be created and changed in several ways. The design is clear and makes the gameplay clear and manageable. Easy to learn, but you have to outsmart your opponents. What do you see in the clouds?
