Take The Throne Preview

Small box card games have been in my collection for as long as I’ve been playing games. In fact, I’ll go one further and say that they’ve been the cornerstone of my collection. I always take card games with me wherever I go because they’re so handy. They’re great ice-breakers, they can fill a gap while you’re waiting for something, and they often take up very little room to play. When Jon from Deathtrap Games got in touch to see if I wanted to take a look at his game – Take The Throne – I jumped at the chance. Teeny box, 3-5 players, super quick gameplay – sold!

Rock, paper, charging horse

Take the Throne has a couple of core concepts that the game is built on.

Firstly, each House (player) in the game has an identical hand of five cards. If you’ve read my reviews in the past, you’ll know that I don’t like to deep-dive too much into exactly how a game is played, but you’ll just have to indulge me here, because this bit is important, and underpins the whole game. As a house player, three of the five cards in your hand work in a rock, paper, scissors style.

Anyone playing an Attack card is in contention for the throne, and the current throne holder chooses which will take it from them. Unless, that is, someone plays their Infiltrate card, which takes precedence over an Attack card. The other option is to play a Charge card, which beats Attack and Infiltrate, but only if there’s only a single Charge card played. If more than one player charges, they cancel each other out. The other cards – Feint and Sabotage – just allow you to swap your played card for another at the cost of 1 VP, and force someone else to change their played card, respectively.

A quiet ten minutes on the throne

The second concept is the idea that one player always has the throne. Being in control of the throne is how you’ll net the 8 VPs you need to win the game. When you hold the throne, you get a unique hand of cards to play with: the Crown deck. The Crown cards are completely different to those in the House decks and offer ways to either carve out more VPs or mess about with the other players’ cards.

The Defend card, for instance, means that all Attack cards played get discarded. Pretty cool on its own, but when you realise that Infiltrate cards depend on Attack cards being in play, it’s a double whammy. you’ll only lose the throne now if one player plays a Charge. Alternatively, you might choose to Abdicate and gain another VP, which sounds crazy, but if the House players cancel one another out and nobody claims the throne, you keep it.

The way the asymmetry works is such a nice twist on a game like Love Letter, for example, which is a game I love. Having asymmetry for only one player is something that’s not done that often. The Beast is a game which is a good example of this. To have one player trying to stay afloat while the others clamber over one another, desperate to pop their water wings, is something which gives this game a different feel to others you might already own.

Final thoughts

I had a sneaky feeling I’d like Take the Throne before I’d even played it. The description ticked so many boxes for me. I was right, too. I do like Take the Throne. It’s a great game that will almost certainly be stuffed into my bag for conventions and to start or end game nights with my group. It only takes one game to learn what each of the cards does, and how they interact with one another.

My only real problem is with player count. Take the Throne plays from three to five players, but I don’t enjoy it as much with three. Having only two House players means that the fun of some of the card play is lost. The Attack card is always beaten by Infiltrate and Charge, and Infiltrate is dependent on Attack being played, so why play Attack? I mean, there’s a bit more meta to it than that, but that’s the sort of thing that people say in their first few three-player games. I much prefer the game with four or five players, where it really shines. Multiple Charge cards that cancel one another are more likely, and watching the Throne player agonise over which Attack player gets the crown is great fun.

Take the Throne is one of those games like Coup, Love Letter, The Resistance, Citadels, etc. A small box, a small deck of cards, with the game itself played above the table, driven by the interactions between the players. These games live and die on their “Oh I can’t believe you did that!” moments, and Take the Throne delivers them by the bucketload. You’ll find your own meta develops in your group, and it changes depending on who you play with, and I love that. A cracking little game from another independent UK designer and publisher, and one I’m very happy to recommend.

Take the Throne launches on Gamefound right here in the summer and at a likely price of less than 20 quid, it’s a no-brainer if you ask me.

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