Kingdomino Origins

Game 8 of the “Bailey House Mini Xmas, not quite a marathon but let’s see how we go, Boardgameranza” is “King Domino Origins” played by myself and Jack(7) late one evening after everyone else is in bed (the same night we played Dice Forge).

Kingdomino Origins is the most recent in the Kingdomino Series (including Dragomino)

My Previous Kingdomino series posts (Including a super young just turned 3 Toby) can be found linked at the bottom (Albeit they are OLD so not up to my more recent levels of detail and quality)… There are way better posts on here especially regarding Dragomino.

Kingdomino is similar to the previous but the main key difference is the use of fire tokens spewing from a volcano that act in place of the crowns. loosely speaking this is kingdomino but you also control the placement of the crowns to a certain extent.

You start with a cave tile and then drawing tiles from a selection of 4 you place your tiles along with the relevant resources down to make a 5×5 (or 7×7 for 2 player) grid.

Each tiles has a value which denotes roughly how powerful it is so that when you choose a more powerful title you are then at the back meaning you get a worse choice next time.

You are then trying to join biomes together to make groups and the value of that group is then denoted as amount of biomes multiplied by the amount of fies. You also get points for resources and bonus points for the player with the most amount of a certain type of resource.

There are other variants as well inside the box. One key difference in this version of Kingdomino is the presence of volcanoes, which can erupt and spread fire to surrounding areas. While these volcanoes do not directly contribute to a player’s score, they can have both positive and negative impacts on the game. On the one hand, the fire from the volcanoes can damage tokens, but on the other hand they add extra fires. In this way, the volcanoes add an element of risk and strategy to the game.

In Totem Mode whenever you draw a tile with a symbol in the bottom corner, you place a matching token on the tile. Whoever has the most of each token type claims additional points at the end of the game. Eruptions of fire can destroy tokens so majority can change around a bit.

Tribe Mode is the final variant in the box. You still place tokens on your tiles when you place them, but you can now spend two or four tokens to recruit cavemen. These unlock additional scoring opportunities by meeting certain adjacency placement rules.

Overall this is an excellent variation of Kingdomino. Production quality is good, the dominos are nice and chunky and the box is a decent size.

In terms of the complexity of the different versions from least to most it goes…

Dragomino
Kingdomino
Kingdomino Origins
Queendomino

Queendomino is still mine and Jack’s favourite but it is a definite increase in complexity.

The great thing about Origins is that it essentially makes the base game redundant as it essentially has pretty much the base game in here plus multiple extra variants that can be mixed and matched.

I think this will definitely take the place of Kingdomino in my collection (which is already excellent) and is a good step up from those little ones moving on from Dragomino.