Intro
Robber Knights up in their keep look down at the riches of towns and villages across the land. The population they protect could easily be under their control. It is simply too tempting…
Robber Knights is a 2-4 player map building game where you seek to capture villages and cities for victory points. You will compete against all other players to control as much of the map as possible for victory.
I’ll make it clear right away that I don’t own this game, I played it from my father’s collection on a slow Thursday night… and honestly I wish I had chose something else.
Robber Knights Setup
Robber Knights is pretty straightforward, but the rules are a little confusing. I’ll break it down for you:
- Grab your colored tiles and pieces
- Break up the tiles, sorted ABCDE, and shuffle individually
- From your “A” tiles, grab 1 castle and one other tile. This is your hand.
- Re-stack your tiles sorted ABCDE
- Have each player place their other (not in hand) two A tiles on the board in a rectangle
- The oldest player begins
How to Play Robber Knights
Each turn, players will do the following actions:
- Place one tile and draw one tile. (This can be repeated two more times each turn)
- Tile description (Left to Right)
- Plains: Costs 1 Knight to move onto
- Forest: Costs 2 Knights to move onto
- Mountain: Costs 3 Knights to move onto
- Lake: Impassable
- If you place a Castle, you can place up to 5 knights (minimum of tile cost) moving away from the castle to capture tiles. (You must play the appropriate amount of knights on the castle as well)
- Knights are permanently placed, and won’t move for the rest of the game.
- There can be up to 4 Knights on each tile, stacked atop each other. Once 4 knights has been reached, the tile is considered impassable.
Scoring:
Tiles are worth points based on the structures:
- Castle: 1 point (pictured center)
- Village: 2 points (pictured right)
- Town: 3 points (pictured left)
However, only the knight on top scores any points.
Game End
The game ends when all players have placed their knights. This means that there can be turns in which only the last player with knights acts.
Whoever scored the most at the end wins.
Conclusion
Now, Robber Knights irks me a bit, I won’t lie. I think the mechanic of only the top Knight scores is toxic for a board game.
While it’s easy to start, and easy to play, the gameplay feels pretty awful in my opinion. If you read Stonemaier’s Mission Statement, you can see pretty quick why I don’t like this one.
The core gameplay of Robber Knights is to take as much as you can from other players, rather than build up what you started with. You could argue that the name “Robber Knights” should give that away, sure, but I personally don’t like any game that you feel the need to apologize for any move you make.
Also, the clear strategy of the game just from reading rules is to wait as long as possible to play Knights.
0.1 out of 10
BREAKGEEK.COM
Wish I could give it zero stars
Try Robber Knights a Different Way!
For me, this is a tough one to fix. I think the game is so “walled-in” to its core mechanic that any house-rules I suggest would break the game.
For instance, if I were to suggest that only the majority on a tiles scores, that would simply just reduce the amount of Knights needed to score, and probably make the game more toxic.
If I were to suggest a point-splitting system, it would just remove the only tension in the game of trying to control the most tiles with the least Knights.
I think the closest I could get would to be to make the game a little crazy just to spice it up:
- All-Out War: Knights do not have a stacking limit
This is truly all that I could drum up. While it doesn’t fix anything, it at least reduces table hostility and makes it a little more relaxed.
