Kingdoms is a German-style board game for 2-4 players designed by Reiner Knizia and released in 2002 by Fantasy Flight. The game is based on Knizia's original German game Auf Heller und Pfennig, but has been given a Medieval Fantasy theme.
In 2003, Kingdoms won the Origins Award for Best Abstract Board Game of 2002.
Players take turns drawing tiles from a stack and laying them on an orthogonal grid, representing a kingdom being settled. Tiles can be either resources (with value +1 to +6) or hazards (-1 to -6). The sum of all tile values on a row or column determines the score for that row or column. A special case is the mountain tile, which splits the row and column it occupies into two, so that each section is scored separately.
Players may also play castle tiles, ranked 1 through 4. To score points from a row or column, a player must have a castle there; castles score the points of the row and column they occupy times the rank of the castle. This score may be a negative number....
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